[Metadatalibrarians] Finding Meaning in Metrics – an ALCTS Scholarly Communications Interest Group and CRS Standards Committee co-sponsored session

[violeta ilik]

**Please excuse cross-posting**



*Finding Meaning in Metrics** – an ALCTS Scholarly Communications Interest
Group <http://www.ala.org/alcts/mgrps/ig/ats-dgsch> and CRS Standards
Committee
<http://www.ala.org/alcts/mgrps/crs/cmtes/ats-sersss> co-sponsored session*

*Time: Saturday, June 25, 2016, 1:00-2:30 pm*

*Location: Orange County Convention Center, Room W102B, Orlando, Florida*

Scheduler link
<http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=143130>



Please join us for three presentations on the theme of research metrics and
assessing impact:



*1. Scholarly Communication Librarians' Relationship with Research Impact
Metrics*

Rachel Miles, Kansas State University Libraries, Digital Scholarship
Librarian



As academia moves towards increasing concern with "real world" research
impact, new measures of impact like altmetrics offer a more immediate
picture of the broader impact of scholarship. Scholarly communication is
also evolving rapidly thanks to technological advances, and with that
change, questions arise surrounding the efficacy of using usage statistics
and traditional citation-based metrics to understanding research impact. To
understand the effect of these changes upon academic librarians, a
nationwide survey was recently administered to over 13,000
academic librarians from Carnegie-classified R1 institutions. This
presentation will examine differences in the awareness of various research
impact metrics among scholarly communication librarians and their practices
pertaining to using usage data and metrics for both job-related tasks and
professional advancement.




*2. **Measuring Towards Openness:  Using Alternative Frameworks and Metrics
to Better Assess and Discover Researchers and their Contributions*

Robin Champieux, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Library,
Scholarly Communication Librarian



Traditional metrics such as the Impact Factor and h-index do a poor job of
measuring and representing the quality, influence, and contributions of
research and researchers.  An over reliance on and misuse of these metrics
curtail the transition to a more open system of science and scholarship.
This talk will explore the landscape of initiatives that are working to
address this issue.  Several case studies will be highlighted to
demonstrate how academic libraries and librarians can affect awareness of
and the successful adoption of alternative and more inclusive frameworks
for research and researcher assessment and discovery.



*3. **Why We Need to Think about New Metrics for Research Evaluation in the
Age of Social Media*

Ehsan Mohammadi, PhD, Northwestern University, Post-doctoral Research
Fellow, Health & Biomedical Informatics Department



The evaluation of research publications is an important task for
universities, policy makers and funding organizations. Using citation
analysis, several indicators such as the Journal Impact Factor and the
h-index have been developed for evaluating research outputs. However,
citations have inherent limitations and citation-based indicators are not
able to capture some types of research impact. Therefore, new metrics are
needed to identify wider influence of research publications.



This presentation discusses identifying and validating new metrics for
research assessment based on social web data. It focuses on Mendeley
readership as a particularly promising alt(ernative) metric. Using
large-scale quantitative and qualitative approaches, it is demonstrated
that Mendeley readership counts can (cautiously) be used as complementary
indicators to overcome some of the limitations of citation data and thus
provide evidence of broader research impacts.





We look forward to seeing you there!

Want to help put together scholarly communications sessions at ALA? The
Scholarly Communications Interest Group is seeking a new vice-chair. You
need to be a member of ALCTS to be able to volunteer. Please let Violeta
<ilik.violeta at gmail.com>and Anneliese <anneliese.taylor at ucsf.edu> know if
you’re interested!



-----



Anneliese Taylor

Chair, ALCTS Scholarly Communications Interest Group

Assistant Director, Scholarly Communications & Collections

University of California, San Francisco

anneliese.taylor at ucsf.edu



Violeta Ilik

Vice-Chair, ALCTS Scholarly Communications Interest Group

Head, Digital Systems & Collection Services

Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University

ilik.violeta at gmail.com



Bonnie Parks

Chair, ALCTS CRS Standards Committee

Collections Technology Librarian

University of Portland

parks at up.edu