About measuring impact

How does my research output 'perform' in world-leading citation databases? What are the research strengths of my institute? Are we collaborating effectively and what are our peers elsewhere doing? Is my research socially relevant?

These, and many other questions drive the effort to measure the impact of research. When used meaningfully and observed in context, the answers can help us make better informed decisions, shed light on the overall reputation of the work of a group or institution, support efforts to obtain funding, collaboration partners or talent, help the research community demonstrate research excellence and much more.

• Measuring academic impact with bibliometrics
• Measuring societal impact with altmetrics
• Tools to measure impact
• On the prudent use of metrics and tools

Measuring academic impact with bibliometrics

Bibliometrics is the quantitative analysis of scientific output, scientific impact, or scientific collaboration. Information on these is provided through quantitative bibliometric indicators.

Bibliometrics analysis is used in research performance evaluation by a wide range of end-users – such as PhD candidates, researchers, research directors and administrators, as well as university policymakers – to build research profiles and identify important patterns and trends within their domains of interest.

Due to limitations associated with bibliometrics, these measures should always be used in conjunction with qualitative evidence such as peer review to ensure the most complete and accurate input in answering a question.

We can help you with creating research performance reports for the UG research community, for different levels of analysis. For help, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Measuring societal impact with altmetrics

The shift towards open access, the rise of web based and networked research and acknowledgment of the importance of societal impact of research have in recent years led to the development of alternative metrics. By capturing mentions in social media, blogs, news, policy documents, as well as the number of downloads, online readers and bookmarks, alternative metrics look beyond journal citations to give us more speedy and multifaceted feedback and a glimpse into how these impact broader audiences.

When used together with bibliometrics, altmetrics can provide a more holistic and broad picture of research and societal impact. This is not to say that it should be used without care – metrics in general, and in particular alternative metrics, should be transparent and reproducible in order to be used in evaluations. If in doubt, please contact us.

Tools to measure impact

We use bibliometric  and altmetric data to obtain a comprehensive understanding of research performance and impact. Several tools are available to conduct such analysis, and these are available to you too.

1. Scival - SciVal is an analytics tool offered by Elsevier that enables the visualization of research performance, benchmarking, analysis of collaborative partnerships and research trends. The data sources for Scival is Elsevier’s abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature called Scopus. While Scopus maintains that it is the largest such database, its coverage of certain disciplines is still limited

2. Altmetric - Altmetric tracks a range of online news and social media sources to capture and report on the attention surrounding scholarly output outside of academia.

Remember, these tools are available to everyone within the university of Groningen. Don’t hesitate to contact us for support with access and use!

On the prudent use of metrics and tools

The University of Groningen recognizes the importance of using bibliometrics and altmetrics responsibly and adheres to the principles propagated in the Leiden Manifesto. The increasing sophistication of our benchmark tools allows us to do in-house analyses and provide benchmarks that can be used in various activities pertaining to research impact assessment, including SEP evaluations. As a result, the Research & Funding department of the Office of the University of Groningen has called for the prudent use of benchmarking tools and produced a set of Guidelines on this matter.

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