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Sunday 15 November 2015

The Tools at Hand: Using Citation Metrics Databases for Assessing the Impact of Scholarship in Architecture and Design-related Disciplines

 Source: http://www.acsa-arch.org/acsa-news/read/read-more/acsa-news/2015/07/29/the-tools-at-hand-using-citation-metrics-databases-for-assessing-the-impact-of-scholarship-in-architecture-and-design-related-disciplines

The
Tools at Hand: Using Citation Metrics Databases for Assessing the
Impact of Scholarship in Architecture and Design-related Disciplines

July 29, 2015

Share:

 
 

 
 
Print



Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors
Submitted by Rose Orcutt, Architecture and Planning Librarian, University at Buffalo Libraries



In Maya Gervits’s article “Citation Analysis and Tenure Metrics in Architecture and Design-Related Disciplines,”
she articulately defines the issues surrounding the growing trends in
citation metrics and analysis and how they apply to architecture
faculty. Her article acknowledges that many existing systems of citation
metrics do not provide as complete a view of the scholarly output of
faculty in architecture and design-related disciplines as they do of the
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines.



Though
citation metrics tools each measure scholarly output in different ways,
most tend to focus on the impact of publications in traditional
formats. However, a new wave of “altmetrics” citation metrics tools,
which include Plum Analytics and Scopus,  go beyond traditional
scholarly publications such as journal articles to track a wide variety
of non-traditional works.  The definition of altmetrics, according to altmetrics.org
is “the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for
analyzing and informing scholarship.” Altmetrics bridges the gap in
current citation analysis by capturing alternative publications and
“real-time metrics of scholarly impact” (Sutton, 2014).
This article will present several citation metrics tools widely used in
academic settings today, including some of the more traditional variety
along with a few that employ altmetrics.



In addition to
assessing the impact of a single scholar’s publications and other
works, a growing trend in higher education is the use of citation
metrics systems by administrators to evaluate the impact of scholarly
output at the institutional or departmental level (Hazelkorn).
Two examples of subscription-based citation tools that provide
measurable data for assessing institutional, departmental, and faculty
performance are Academic Analytics and Plum Analytics. Both tools are
prorated based on the institution’s full-time equivalent (FTE) but are
expensive.



Academic Analytics
is known as a “business intelligence” software tool or database that
collects data on scholarly citations. It compares a university’s
productivity discipline-by-discipline and tracks the institution’s
overall performance. The database tallies faculty activities in these
five areas of research: journal articles, citations, books, research
grants, and awards. The citations are derived from Scopus. The database
offers a number of different visualization tools to show data trends,
patterns, and the strengths and weaknesses of the institution.



Plum Analytics (PlumX)
is an EBSCO database and is similar to Academic Analytics as it also
measures scholarly productivity discipline by discipline and the overall
performance of the university by tracking traditional publications.
However, it also tracks output using altmetrics, which take into account
evidence of impact garnered from social media discussions, article
views and downloads, news media mentions, conference proceedings,
videos, blogs, tweets, grants, patents, presentations, clinical trials,
book chapters, and more. The citations originate from PubMed Central,
Scopus, and USPTO.  Individual author records are used to populate the
citation data. Graphs and comparison charts are easy to generate from
the statistical output.



Scopus and Web of Science are
both library subscription-based databases that analyze author output by
tracking citations. As competing products, they cover all disciplines
but have origins in the STEM disciplines. The cost of each is prorated
based on the institution’s FTE.



Scopus
is a relatively new database by Elsevier. It was introduced as a
citation tool in 2004. The database tracks scholarly citations from
peer-reviewed journals, books, patents, and conference proceedings from
all disciplines and has a large international coverage. The metrics
tracking covers author’s total citation and document counts, citations
per year and h-index. Charts and tables can be manipulated easily. Altmetric,
which will be discussed further along in this article, is a third party
web application that has been integrated into Scopus. The application
runs in a sidebar within the abstract page, providing additional
altmetrics statistics. Scopus also announced the creation of their own
Article Metrics app that will be made available at the end of this
summer.



Web of Science (WOS) was created from the Science Citation Index which began in the 1960s by Eugene Garfield (Aghaei Chadegani et al., 2013).
WOS includes the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation
Index, Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Science Index, Current
Contents, conference proceedings, and two chemistry indexes. Citation
reports are created on an author, displaying the number of times the
author is cited, the average citations per item and the h-index in graph
and chart form. The results of the reports are based on only those
journals that are indexed in the Web of Science database collection. In
March 2015, a press release on the WOS Thomson ISI website announced a
collaboration with Google Scholar to enable citation count
cross-checking.



Google Scholar
generates statistics from the author’s own articles and then tracks
their published work. The author creates and maintains his/her own
profile which can be made public, graphs citations over time and
generated reports on a publication’s h-index number. Google Scholar
Metrics is free, and covers a large portion of scholarly articles
published in the last five years but “only includes publications with at
least a hundred articles” from that same time period. 



Harzing Publish or Perish is a free, downloadable software program that retrieves raw academic citations from Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search.
In addition to capturing journal citations in English, Harzing also
includes LOTE (Language Other Than English) citations and book chapters.
The reports include the total number of citations, number of citations
per year and the h-index. Along with the Author Impact Analysis, another feature is the Journal Impact Analysis



Altmetric,
a fee-based tool, was founded in 2011 and according to its website, its
mission “is to track and analyze the online activity around scholarly
literature.” Data is collected from newspapers, government policy
documents, and mentions of scholarly publications in online
conversations on social media sites and elsewhere. A score is given
based on volume of mentions, number of sources, and how often that
author is discussed unless the article was published before 2011 then
the score may be inaccurate. An embedded API donut badge displays a
color-coded visualization of each social media type represented in the
score and the number is placed in the middle of the donut.



ORCID
is an open, community-driven platform where a scholar can create their
own research profile and add publications and other works including
“research objects such as datasets, equipment, articles, media stories,
citations, experiments, patents, and notebooks.” An author creates a
record of their scholarly work which is tracked by an ORCID iD, a unique
digital identifier assigned to each author. This digital identifier
distinguishes one author from another and is used by other platforms
such as PlumX, Academic Analytics, and Scopus to enable cross-platform
sharing of metrics data. ORCID maintains a public registry of the all
the ORCID iD profiles which is searchable in order to facilitate
communication and collaboration among researchers



Used
together, altmetrics and traditional citation metrics systems provide a
holistic profile of an author’s body of work. The use of citation
metrics is an established trend with a tangible impact within the
academic community in some disciplines and an emerging methodology among
others. Statistical analysis of faculty and departmental performance is
critically important to higher education administrators as they seek to
demonstrate productivity and compete for funding. Architecture and
design subject librarians can play a vital role in faculty tenure and
promotion by advocating for the adoption, support and use of altmetrics
as a way to produce a more well-rounded profile of the scholarly output
of architecture and design faculty.







References







Aghaei
Chadegani, A., Salehi, H., Yunus, M. M., Farhadi, H., Fooladi, M.,
Farhadi, M., & Ale Ebrahim, N. (2013). A comparison between two main
academic literature collections: Web of Science and Scopus databases. Asian Social Science, 9(5), 18-26.








Hazelkorn, E. Rankings and the reshaping of higher education : The battle for world-class excellence (2nd ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.







Sutton, S. W. (2014). Altmetrics: What good are they to academic libraries? Kansas Library Association College and University Libraries Section Proceedings, 4(2), 1-7. 


Categories

  • Features and News


Tags

  • AASL

  • Association of Architecture School Librarians



You must log in to comment.




- See more at:
http://www.acsa-arch.org/acsa-news/read/read-more/acsa-news/2015/07/29/the-tools-at-hand-using-citation-metrics-databases-for-assessing-the-impact-of-scholarship-in-architecture-and-design-related-disciplines#.dpuf






The Tools at Hand: Using Citation Metrics Databases for Assessing the
Impact of Scholarship in Architecture and Design-related Disciplines

July 29, 2015

Share:



   





    Print
Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors

Submitted by Rose Orcutt, Architecture and Planning Librarian, University
at Buffalo Libraries 
In Maya Gervits’s article “Citation
Analysis and Tenure Metrics in Architecture and Design-Related Disciplines
,”
she articulately defines the issues surrounding the growing trends in citation
metrics and analysis and how they apply to architecture faculty. Her article
acknowledges that many existing systems of citation metrics do not provide as
complete a view of the scholarly output of faculty in architecture and
design-related disciplines as they do of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering,
Mathematics) disciplines.



Though citation metrics tools each measure scholarly output in different
ways, most tend to focus on the impact of publications in traditional formats.
However, a new wave of “altmetrics” citation metrics tools, which include Plum
Analytics and Scopus,  go beyond traditional scholarly publications such
as journal articles to track a wide variety of non-traditional works.  The
definition of altmetrics, according to altmetrics.org
is “the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for analyzing
and informing scholarship.” Altmetrics bridges the gap in current citation
analysis by capturing alternative publications and “real-time metrics of
scholarly impact” (Sutton, 2014). This article will present several
citation metrics tools widely used in academic settings today, including some
of the more traditional variety along with a few that employ altmetrics.



In addition to assessing the impact of a single scholar’s publications and
other works, a growing trend in higher education is the use of citation metrics
systems by administrators to evaluate the impact of scholarly output at the
institutional or departmental level (Hazelkorn). Two examples of subscription-based
citation tools that provide measurable data for assessing institutional,
departmental, and faculty performance are Academic Analytics and Plum
Analytics. Both tools are prorated based on the institution’s full-time
equivalent (FTE) but are expensive.



Academic Analytics is known
as a “business intelligence” software tool or database that collects data on
scholarly citations. It compares a university’s productivity
discipline-by-discipline and tracks the institution’s overall performance. The
database tallies faculty activities in these five areas of research: journal
articles, citations, books, research grants, and awards. The citations are
derived from Scopus. The database offers a number of different visualization
tools to show data trends, patterns, and the strengths and weaknesses of the
institution.



Plum Analytics (PlumX) is an
EBSCO database and is similar to Academic Analytics as it also measures
scholarly productivity discipline by discipline and the overall performance of
the university by tracking traditional publications. However, it also tracks
output using altmetrics, which take into account evidence of impact garnered
from social media discussions, article views and downloads, news media
mentions, conference proceedings, videos, blogs, tweets, grants, patents,
presentations, clinical trials, book chapters, and more. The citations
originate from PubMed Central, Scopus, and USPTO.  Individual author
records are used to populate the citation data. Graphs and comparison charts
are easy to generate from the statistical output.



Scopus and Web of Science are both library subscription-based databases that
analyze author output by tracking citations. As competing products, they cover
all disciplines but have origins in the STEM disciplines. The cost of each is
prorated based on the institution’s FTE.



Scopus is a
relatively new database by Elsevier. It was introduced as a citation tool in
2004. The database tracks scholarly citations from peer-reviewed journals,
books, patents, and conference proceedings from all disciplines and has a large
international coverage. The metrics tracking covers author’s total citation and
document counts, citations per year and h-index. Charts and tables can be
manipulated easily. Altmetric, which
will be discussed further along in this article, is a third party web application
that has been integrated into Scopus. The application runs in a sidebar within
the abstract page, providing additional altmetrics statistics. Scopus also
announced the creation of their own Article Metrics app that will be made
available at the end of this summer.



Web of Science (WOS) was created from the
Science Citation Index which began in the 1960s by Eugene Garfield (Aghaei Chadegani et al., 2013). WOS
includes the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index,
Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Science Index, Current Contents,
conference proceedings, and two chemistry indexes. Citation reports are created
on an author, displaying the number of times the author is cited, the average
citations per item and the h-index in graph and chart form. The results of the
reports are based on only those journals that are indexed in the Web of Science
database collection. In March 2015, a press release on the WOS Thomson ISI
website announced a collaboration with Google Scholar to enable citation count
cross-checking.



Google Scholar generates
statistics from the author’s own articles and then tracks their published work.
The author creates and maintains his/her own profile which can be made public,
graphs citations over time and generated reports on a publication’s h-index
number. Google Scholar Metrics is free, and covers a large portion of scholarly
articles published in the last five years but “only includes publications with
at least a hundred articles” from that same time period. 



Harzing Publish or Perish is a
free, downloadable software program that retrieves raw academic citations from
Google Scholar and Microsoft
Academic Search
. In addition to capturing journal citations in English,
Harzing also includes LOTE (Language Other Than English) citations and book
chapters. The reports include the total number of citations, number of
citations per year and the h-index. Along with the Author Impact Analysis,
another feature is the Journal Impact
Analysis




Altmetric, a fee-based tool, was
founded in 2011 and according to its website, its mission “is to track and
analyze the online activity around scholarly literature.” Data is collected
from newspapers, government policy documents, and mentions of scholarly
publications in online conversations on social media sites and elsewhere. A
score is given based on volume of mentions, number of sources, and how often that
author is discussed unless the article was published before 2011 then the score
may be inaccurate. An embedded API donut badge displays a color-coded
visualization of each social media type represented in the score and the number
is placed in the middle of the donut.



ORCID is an open, community-driven platform
where a scholar can create their own research profile and add publications and
other works including “research objects such as datasets, equipment, articles,
media stories, citations, experiments, patents, and notebooks.” An author
creates a record of their scholarly work which is tracked by an ORCID iD, a
unique digital identifier assigned to each author. This digital identifier
distinguishes one author from another and is used by other platforms such as
PlumX, Academic Analytics, and Scopus to enable cross-platform sharing of
metrics data. ORCID maintains a public registry of the all the ORCID iD
profiles which is searchable in order to facilitate communication and
collaboration among researchers



Used together, altmetrics and traditional citation metrics systems provide a
holistic profile of an author’s body of work. The use of citation metrics is an
established trend with a tangible impact within the academic community in some
disciplines and an emerging methodology among others. Statistical analysis of
faculty and departmental performance is critically important to higher
education administrators as they seek to demonstrate productivity and compete
for funding. Architecture and design subject librarians can play a vital role
in faculty tenure and promotion by advocating for the adoption, support and use
of altmetrics as a way to produce a more well-rounded profile of the scholarly
output of architecture and design faculty.







References







Aghaei Chadegani, A., Salehi, H., Yunus, M. M., Farhadi,
H., Fooladi, M., Farhadi, M., & Ale Ebrahim, N. (2013). A comparison
between two main academic literature collections: Web of Science and Scopus
databases. Asian Social Science, 9(5), 18-26.








Hazelkorn, E. Rankings and the reshaping of higher
education : The battle for world-class excellence
(2nd ed.).
New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.







Sutton, S. W. (2014). Altmetrics: What good are they to
academic libraries? Kansas Library Association College and University
Libraries Section Proceedings, 4
(2), 1-7. 








Categories
  • Features
    and News
Tags
  • AASL
  • Association
    of Architecture School Librarians
You must log
in
to comment.



- See more at:
http://www.acsa-arch.org/acsa-news/read/read-more/acsa-news/2015/07/29/the-tools-at-hand-using-citation-metrics-databases-for-assessing-the-impact-of-scholarship-in-architecture-and-design-related-disciplines#.dpuf



The
Tools at Hand: Using Citation Metrics Databases for Assessing the
Impact of Scholarship in Architecture and Design-related Disciplines

July 29, 2015

Share:

 
 

 
 
Print



Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors
Submitted by Rose Orcutt, Architecture and Planning Librarian, University at Buffalo Libraries



In Maya Gervits’s article “Citation Analysis and Tenure Metrics in Architecture and Design-Related Disciplines,”
she articulately defines the issues surrounding the growing trends in
citation metrics and analysis and how they apply to architecture
faculty. Her article acknowledges that many existing systems of citation
metrics do not provide as complete a view of the scholarly output of
faculty in architecture and design-related disciplines as they do of the
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines.



Though
citation metrics tools each measure scholarly output in different ways,
most tend to focus on the impact of publications in traditional
formats. However, a new wave of “altmetrics” citation metrics tools,
which include Plum Analytics and Scopus,  go beyond traditional
scholarly publications such as journal articles to track a wide variety
of non-traditional works.  The definition of altmetrics, according to altmetrics.org
is “the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for
analyzing and informing scholarship.” Altmetrics bridges the gap in
current citation analysis by capturing alternative publications and
“real-time metrics of scholarly impact” (Sutton, 2014).
This article will present several citation metrics tools widely used in
academic settings today, including some of the more traditional variety
along with a few that employ altmetrics.



In addition to
assessing the impact of a single scholar’s publications and other
works, a growing trend in higher education is the use of citation
metrics systems by administrators to evaluate the impact of scholarly
output at the institutional or departmental level (Hazelkorn).
Two examples of subscription-based citation tools that provide
measurable data for assessing institutional, departmental, and faculty
performance are Academic Analytics and Plum Analytics. Both tools are
prorated based on the institution’s full-time equivalent (FTE) but are
expensive.



Academic Analytics
is known as a “business intelligence” software tool or database that
collects data on scholarly citations. It compares a university’s
productivity discipline-by-discipline and tracks the institution’s
overall performance. The database tallies faculty activities in these
five areas of research: journal articles, citations, books, research
grants, and awards. The citations are derived from Scopus. The database
offers a number of different visualization tools to show data trends,
patterns, and the strengths and weaknesses of the institution.



Plum Analytics (PlumX)
is an EBSCO database and is similar to Academic Analytics as it also
measures scholarly productivity discipline by discipline and the overall
performance of the university by tracking traditional publications.
However, it also tracks output using altmetrics, which take into account
evidence of impact garnered from social media discussions, article
views and downloads, news media mentions, conference proceedings,
videos, blogs, tweets, grants, patents, presentations, clinical trials,
book chapters, and more. The citations originate from PubMed Central,
Scopus, and USPTO.  Individual author records are used to populate the
citation data. Graphs and comparison charts are easy to generate from
the statistical output.



Scopus and Web of Science are
both library subscription-based databases that analyze author output by
tracking citations. As competing products, they cover all disciplines
but have origins in the STEM disciplines. The cost of each is prorated
based on the institution’s FTE.



Scopus
is a relatively new database by Elsevier. It was introduced as a
citation tool in 2004. The database tracks scholarly citations from
peer-reviewed journals, books, patents, and conference proceedings from
all disciplines and has a large international coverage. The metrics
tracking covers author’s total citation and document counts, citations
per year and h-index. Charts and tables can be manipulated easily. Altmetric,
which will be discussed further along in this article, is a third party
web application that has been integrated into Scopus. The application
runs in a sidebar within the abstract page, providing additional
altmetrics statistics. Scopus also announced the creation of their own
Article Metrics app that will be made available at the end of this
summer.



Web of Science (WOS) was created from the Science Citation Index which began in the 1960s by Eugene Garfield (Aghaei Chadegani et al., 2013).
WOS includes the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation
Index, Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Science Index, Current
Contents, conference proceedings, and two chemistry indexes. Citation
reports are created on an author, displaying the number of times the
author is cited, the average citations per item and the h-index in graph
and chart form. The results of the reports are based on only those
journals that are indexed in the Web of Science database collection. In
March 2015, a press release on the WOS Thomson ISI website announced a
collaboration with Google Scholar to enable citation count
cross-checking.



Google Scholar
generates statistics from the author’s own articles and then tracks
their published work. The author creates and maintains his/her own
profile which can be made public, graphs citations over time and
generated reports on a publication’s h-index number. Google Scholar
Metrics is free, and covers a large portion of scholarly articles
published in the last five years but “only includes publications with at
least a hundred articles” from that same time period. 



Harzing Publish or Perish is a free, downloadable software program that retrieves raw academic citations from Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search.
In addition to capturing journal citations in English, Harzing also
includes LOTE (Language Other Than English) citations and book chapters.
The reports include the total number of citations, number of citations
per year and the h-index. Along with the Author Impact Analysis, another feature is the Journal Impact Analysis



Altmetric,
a fee-based tool, was founded in 2011 and according to its website, its
mission “is to track and analyze the online activity around scholarly
literature.” Data is collected from newspapers, government policy
documents, and mentions of scholarly publications in online
conversations on social media sites and elsewhere. A score is given
based on volume of mentions, number of sources, and how often that
author is discussed unless the article was published before 2011 then
the score may be inaccurate. An embedded API donut badge displays a
color-coded visualization of each social media type represented in the
score and the number is placed in the middle of the donut.



ORCID
is an open, community-driven platform where a scholar can create their
own research profile and add publications and other works including
“research objects such as datasets, equipment, articles, media stories,
citations, experiments, patents, and notebooks.” An author creates a
record of their scholarly work which is tracked by an ORCID iD, a unique
digital identifier assigned to each author. This digital identifier
distinguishes one author from another and is used by other platforms
such as PlumX, Academic Analytics, and Scopus to enable cross-platform
sharing of metrics data. ORCID maintains a public registry of the all
the ORCID iD profiles which is searchable in order to facilitate
communication and collaboration among researchers



Used
together, altmetrics and traditional citation metrics systems provide a
holistic profile of an author’s body of work. The use of citation
metrics is an established trend with a tangible impact within the
academic community in some disciplines and an emerging methodology among
others. Statistical analysis of faculty and departmental performance is
critically important to higher education administrators as they seek to
demonstrate productivity and compete for funding. Architecture and
design subject librarians can play a vital role in faculty tenure and
promotion by advocating for the adoption, support and use of altmetrics
as a way to produce a more well-rounded profile of the scholarly output
of architecture and design faculty.







References







Aghaei
Chadegani, A., Salehi, H., Yunus, M. M., Farhadi, H., Fooladi, M.,
Farhadi, M., & Ale Ebrahim, N. (2013). A comparison between two main
academic literature collections: Web of Science and Scopus databases. Asian Social Science, 9(5), 18-26.








Hazelkorn, E. Rankings and the reshaping of higher education : The battle for world-class excellence (2nd ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.







Sutton, S. W. (2014). Altmetrics: What good are they to academic libraries? Kansas Library Association College and University Libraries Section Proceedings, 4(2), 1-7. 


Categories

  • Features and News


Tags

  • AASL

  • Association of Architecture School Librarians



You must log in to comment.




- See more at:
http://www.acsa-arch.org/acsa-news/read/read-more/acsa-news/2015/07/29/the-tools-at-hand-using-citation-metrics-databases-for-assessing-the-impact-of-scholarship-in-architecture-and-design-related-disciplines#.dpuf

The
Tools at Hand: Using Citation Metrics Databases for Assessing the
Impact of Scholarship in Architecture and Design-related Disciplines

July 29, 2015

Share:

 
 

 
 
Print



Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors
Submitted by Rose Orcutt, Architecture and Planning Librarian, University at Buffalo Libraries



In Maya Gervits’s article “Citation Analysis and Tenure Metrics in Architecture and Design-Related Disciplines,”
she articulately defines the issues surrounding the growing trends in
citation metrics and analysis and how they apply to architecture
faculty. Her article acknowledges that many existing systems of citation
metrics do not provide as complete a view of the scholarly output of
faculty in architecture and design-related disciplines as they do of the
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines.



Though
citation metrics tools each measure scholarly output in different ways,
most tend to focus on the impact of publications in traditional
formats. However, a new wave of “altmetrics” citation metrics tools,
which include Plum Analytics and Scopus,  go beyond traditional
scholarly publications such as journal articles to track a wide variety
of non-traditional works.  The definition of altmetrics, according to altmetrics.org
is “the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for
analyzing and informing scholarship.” Altmetrics bridges the gap in
current citation analysis by capturing alternative publications and
“real-time metrics of scholarly impact” (Sutton, 2014).
This article will present several citation metrics tools widely used in
academic settings today, including some of the more traditional variety
along with a few that employ altmetrics.



In addition to
assessing the impact of a single scholar’s publications and other
works, a growing trend in higher education is the use of citation
metrics systems by administrators to evaluate the impact of scholarly
output at the institutional or departmental level (Hazelkorn).
Two examples of subscription-based citation tools that provide
measurable data for assessing institutional, departmental, and faculty
performance are Academic Analytics and Plum Analytics. Both tools are
prorated based on the institution’s full-time equivalent (FTE) but are
expensive.



Academic Analytics
is known as a “business intelligence” software tool or database that
collects data on scholarly citations. It compares a university’s
productivity discipline-by-discipline and tracks the institution’s
overall performance. The database tallies faculty activities in these
five areas of research: journal articles, citations, books, research
grants, and awards. The citations are derived from Scopus. The database
offers a number of different visualization tools to show data trends,
patterns, and the strengths and weaknesses of the institution.



Plum Analytics (PlumX)
is an EBSCO database and is similar to Academic Analytics as it also
measures scholarly productivity discipline by discipline and the overall
performance of the university by tracking traditional publications.
However, it also tracks output using altmetrics, which take into account
evidence of impact garnered from social media discussions, article
views and downloads, news media mentions, conference proceedings,
videos, blogs, tweets, grants, patents, presentations, clinical trials,
book chapters, and more. The citations originate from PubMed Central,
Scopus, and USPTO.  Individual author records are used to populate the
citation data. Graphs and comparison charts are easy to generate from
the statistical output.



Scopus and Web of Science are
both library subscription-based databases that analyze author output by
tracking citations. As competing products, they cover all disciplines
but have origins in the STEM disciplines. The cost of each is prorated
based on the institution’s FTE.



Scopus
is a relatively new database by Elsevier. It was introduced as a
citation tool in 2004. The database tracks scholarly citations from
peer-reviewed journals, books, patents, and conference proceedings from
all disciplines and has a large international coverage. The metrics
tracking covers author’s total citation and document counts, citations
per year and h-index. Charts and tables can be manipulated easily. Altmetric,
which will be discussed further along in this article, is a third party
web application that has been integrated into Scopus. The application
runs in a sidebar within the abstract page, providing additional
altmetrics statistics. Scopus also announced the creation of their own
Article Metrics app that will be made available at the end of this
summer.



Web of Science (WOS) was created from the Science Citation Index which began in the 1960s by Eugene Garfield (Aghaei Chadegani et al., 2013).
WOS includes the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation
Index, Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Science Index, Current
Contents, conference proceedings, and two chemistry indexes. Citation
reports are created on an author, displaying the number of times the
author is cited, the average citations per item and the h-index in graph
and chart form. The results of the reports are based on only those
journals that are indexed in the Web of Science database collection. In
March 2015, a press release on the WOS Thomson ISI website announced a
collaboration with Google Scholar to enable citation count
cross-checking.



Google Scholar
generates statistics from the author’s own articles and then tracks
their published work. The author creates and maintains his/her own
profile which can be made public, graphs citations over time and
generated reports on a publication’s h-index number. Google Scholar
Metrics is free, and covers a large portion of scholarly articles
published in the last five years but “only includes publications with at
least a hundred articles” from that same time period. 



Harzing Publish or Perish is a free, downloadable software program that retrieves raw academic citations from Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search.
In addition to capturing journal citations in English, Harzing also
includes LOTE (Language Other Than English) citations and book chapters.
The reports include the total number of citations, number of citations
per year and the h-index. Along with the Author Impact Analysis, another feature is the Journal Impact Analysis



Altmetric,
a fee-based tool, was founded in 2011 and according to its website, its
mission “is to track and analyze the online activity around scholarly
literature.” Data is collected from newspapers, government policy
documents, and mentions of scholarly publications in online
conversations on social media sites and elsewhere. A score is given
based on volume of mentions, number of sources, and how often that
author is discussed unless the article was published before 2011 then
the score may be inaccurate. An embedded API donut badge displays a
color-coded visualization of each social media type represented in the
score and the number is placed in the middle of the donut.



ORCID
is an open, community-driven platform where a scholar can create their
own research profile and add publications and other works including
“research objects such as datasets, equipment, articles, media stories,
citations, experiments, patents, and notebooks.” An author creates a
record of their scholarly work which is tracked by an ORCID iD, a unique
digital identifier assigned to each author. This digital identifier
distinguishes one author from another and is used by other platforms
such as PlumX, Academic Analytics, and Scopus to enable cross-platform
sharing of metrics data. ORCID maintains a public registry of the all
the ORCID iD profiles which is searchable in order to facilitate
communication and collaboration among researchers



Used
together, altmetrics and traditional citation metrics systems provide a
holistic profile of an author’s body of work. The use of citation
metrics is an established trend with a tangible impact within the
academic community in some disciplines and an emerging methodology among
others. Statistical analysis of faculty and departmental performance is
critically important to higher education administrators as they seek to
demonstrate productivity and compete for funding. Architecture and
design subject librarians can play a vital role in faculty tenure and
promotion by advocating for the adoption, support and use of altmetrics
as a way to produce a more well-rounded profile of the scholarly output
of architecture and design faculty.







References







Aghaei
Chadegani, A., Salehi, H., Yunus, M. M., Farhadi, H., Fooladi, M.,
Farhadi, M., & Ale Ebrahim, N. (2013). A comparison between two main
academic literature collections: Web of Science and Scopus databases. Asian Social Science, 9(5), 18-26.








Hazelkorn, E. Rankings and the reshaping of higher education : The battle for world-class excellence (2nd ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.







Sutton, S. W. (2014). Altmetrics: What good are they to academic libraries? Kansas Library Association College and University Libraries Section Proceedings, 4(2), 1-7. 


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http://www.acsa-arch.org/acsa-news/read/read-more/acsa-news/2015/07/29/the-tools-at-hand-using-citation-metrics-databases-for-assessing-the-impact-of-scholarship-in-architecture-and-design-related-disciplines#.dpuf
The Tools at Hand: Using Citation Metrics Databases for Assessing the Impact of Scholarship in Architecture and Design-related Disciplines

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