Abstract
AbstractThe impact agenda in many countries has led to increased attempts to assess the societal impacts of research. Altmetrics, webometrics, and other alternative indicators have been proposed to support this task, and many journal articles have been written that exploit alternative indicators to investigate societal impacts. Nevertheless, methodological studies of many of these indicators have revealed that extreme care must be taken with gathering, aggregating, and interpreting them. This article gives an overview of current alternative indicators, summarizes empirical research, and reports a series of common problems and mistakes to avoid when using them. The main issues are: selecting indicators to match goals; aggregating them in a way sensitive to field and publication year differences; largely avoiding them in formal evaluations; understanding that they reflect a biased fraction of the activity of interest; and understanding the type of impact reflected rather than interpreting them at face value.
Highlights
The government-led drive in many countries to push academic research toward activities with societal impacts is known as the impact agenda (Gunn and Mintrom, 2016; Chubb et al, 2017)
Given that altmetric data providers deliver a predefined package of alternative indicators and that there is a wide range that could potentially be used, it is important to construct a rationale for selecting the indicators to investigate
Webometrics, and citation counts are highly skewed, Pearson correlations are unhelpful unless the raw data are log-transformed first to reduce skewing
Summary
The government-led drive in many countries to push academic research toward activities with societal impacts is known as the impact agenda (Gunn and Mintrom, 2016; Chubb et al, 2017) These impacts might include commercial, cultural, social, or health benefits and might apply to individual organizations or society as a whole; typically only impacts within academia are ignored. This internationally increasing importance of demonstrating societal impacts for research has created a new demand for alternative impact indicators. In the last 20 years, new interest has developed in exploiting the web to generate alternative impact indicators for academic research,
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