I’ve been thinking recently about a ‘researcher impact’ dashboard. The way I’m thinking at the moment, it could be setup as a Shiny App to let researchers view a set of bibliometric data, plus some wider impact stuff including perhaps a ‘REFme’ tool which might facilitate writing impact studies (for the UK REF) possibly with some automated feedback. This is partly off the back of realising that the REF impact case studies are all available online, with API access explicitly offered for research purposes, indeed some people have done some [text mining of the REF impact reports]1. You can imagine, for example, a tool which: 1. Allowed you to type in an impact case study and find similar entries in the last excellence framework (case studies [here]2) 2. Possibly gave some feedback e.g. on the rhetorical structure, perhaps using the [AWA tool we’re running at UTS]3 – so the idea would be you’d write a statement and receive some guidance on tightening up/strengthening the statement 3. Offered some bibliometric information for the researcher (perhaps with facility to compare across international systems, e.g. [UCU has collected some comparisons]4) 1. This R package https://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/refnet/ looks at some of the standard (web of science, etc.) with citation, SNA, etc. But we probably want other sources too? (It should be possible to scrape google scholar profiles if the page URL is given, ORCID might give more info, possibly link to Repository pages espec if based on ORO-platform). 2. The [Harzing software]5 does some of this too 4. Add in some alt-metrics, e.g. the social network R package lets you search for particulrl URLs across networks (or use the [RAltmetrics package]6 ) 5. Add in a (likely very rough and ready) ‘supporting evidence’ tool to track e.g. mentions on google news, perhaps using tm & curl or supporting evidence, can e.g. [search google news using tm package & curl]7 6. Allowed you to tie to Open Access publications (maybe even pulling in related publications, e.g. via the [CORE service]8) At the moment I think you have to go to multiple websites to view this set of data, and maintain a kind of ‘impact dashboard’. Also many tools offer only partial datasets, e.g. [Elsevier have released SciVal]9 – which seems to do some cool analysis:
- Visualize research performance
- Access ccomprehensive research performance summaries of any desired research entities, identify their unique research strengths and multidisciplinary Research Areas.
- Benchmark your progress
- Compare the performance of any institutions, countries, and pre-defined groups, or create your own research area and monitor progress over time.
- Develop collaborative partnerships
- Identify and analyze existing and potential collaboration opportunities based on publication output and citation impact.
…except for the fact it seems to only take Scopus data, so for many people/disciplines it’s entirely redundant (and the data won’t join up to other sources…annoying given e.g. microsoft academia does show lots of cool stuff, and they’ve opened their data up)….so data challenge?
Footnotes
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https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=text+mining+impact+case+studies&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=2TwYVuz7LtONatzXn7AP ↩
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http://ref.web.ucu.org.uk/2013/08/10/ref-international-comparisons/ ↩
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https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=google+news+searchr+cran&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=MT0YVoL-AsTqasSLvrgP ↩