Psychiatry: Metrics and Data Management

On this page

• Overview - of metrics, a tutorial, and some general references.

• Author ID Options - a useful aid in getting your publications easily recognised, and tracking your impact

• Journal Ranking and Bibliometrics - metrics for journals (including Impact Factors) and for individual researchers (including H-Index)

• Altmetrics - beyond traditional trackers

• ERA and HERDC

• Research Data Management - the University's online system

• Adelaide Research and Scholarshp (AR&S) - maximising access to your work

• Aurora (University of Adelaide Researcher Outputs, Reporting & Analytics) - to make your publications available through Researcher Profiles, and AR&S

Metrics, often referred to as bibliometrics, includes measures such as numbers of publications and the citation counts for them. It can include individual author metrics like the h-index, or journal quality metrics like the Impact Factor.

Metrics are discipline-specific and will vary over time, so you need to consider both discipline and time frame when assessing relative ranking and impact.

Research impact can be measured in a variety of ways. Author and journal metrics are two indicators that can be used. These can be used to track scholarly research, and support research grant and promotion applications.

The MyRI (Measuring your Research Impact) online tutorial comprises 3 modules. It is designed to be worked through module by module but if you just want to calculate your h-index or how many times your publications have been cited, you can select these options from the side-bar menu.

Module 1: Introduction to Bibliometrics

Module 2: Track your Research Impact

Module 3: Journal Ranking and Analysis

 
Information on citing of books is here

There is some interesting background reading available from the University of Queensland Library.

Below are a few articles to help you understand how metrics work, and what they can do for you.

What can article level metrics do for you?
Fenner M.
PLoS Biology 2013 Oct;11(10):e1001687. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001687. Epub 2013 Oct 22.

Trends in citations to books on epidemiological and statistical methods in the biomedical literature.
Porta M1, Vandenbroucke JP, Ioannidis JP, Sanz S, Fernandez E, Bhopal R, Morabia A, Victora C, Lopez T.
PLoS One 2013 May 7;8(5):e61837. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0061837. Print 2013

Profit (p)-index: the degree to which authors profit from co-authors.
Aziz NA1, Rozing MP.
PLoS One 2013;8(4):e59814. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059814. Epub 2013 Apr 3.

ORCID (open access)
ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. You can also link your ORCiD to Scopus. Some journals now request an ORCiD ID when you submit an article for publication.

The University encourages all academic staff and HDR students to establish a personal ORCiD (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). Why? See the What is ORCiD? page.

Researcher ID (Thomson Reuters)
Each member is assigned a unique identifier to enable researchers to manage their publication lists, track their times cited counts and h-index, identify potential collaborators and avoid author misidentification. Researcher ID information integrates with the Web of Science and is ORCID compliant.

Scopus author feedback wizard
Collects all your Scopus records in one unique author profile. Can take up to 4 weeks to collate documents published under multiple name variants.
You can also link your clean Scopus ID to your ORCiD via Scopus2ORCID

Google Scholar Profile
Personally created and maintained web profile. Automatically updates when Google Scholar finds new citations of your work. Can make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name. 

Eigenfactor

eigenfactor.org - ranking and mapping scientific journals
The Eigenfactor is an alternative or supplement to the impact factor. It is intended to be used for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for mapping the structure of academic research. It allows calculation of a journal's Article Influence score, which is a measure of the average influence of each of its articles over the first five years after publication.

H-Index, or Hirsch Numbers

The H-index, sometimes called the Hirsch Index or Hirsch number, is based on the distribution of citations received by a given researcher's publications. The index was originally proposed by Jorge Hirsch in 2005.

The h-index is simply a measure of the number of publications published (productivity) as well as how often they are cited (impact).

For example:

If your h-index is 15, you have 15 papers cited 15 times or more.
If your h-index is 20, you have 20 papers cited 20 times or more.

Creating an H-Index on Scopus

Scopus Journal Metrics

Scopus Journal Metrics now includes:-

CiteScore is the latest addition to Scopus journal metrics options. CiteScore is calculated on an annual basis, showing the average citations for a full calendar year, and CiteScore Tracker provides a current view of how a journal is performing during the course of the year, as it builds up each month.

SNIP (Source-Normalized Impact per Paper)
"SNIP measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a given subject field. The impact of a single citation is given a higher value in subject areas where citations are fewer".

SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)
"A metric based on the idea that ‘all citations are not created equal’. With SJR, the subject field, quality and reputation of the journal have a direct impact on the value of a citation".

SCImago
The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database.

Help with CiteScore, and other Scopus journal metrics

Journal Impact Factors

The journal impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The impact factor will help you evaluate a journal’s relative importance, especially when you compare it to others in the same field. Note that not all journals are covered by Thomson ISI citation indexes and therefore do not have calculated impact factors.

Incites Journal Citation Reports - Previously Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
Contains impact factors and other citation data derived from ISI's Citation indexes and covers journals in science, technology, and the social sciences. It allows you to check impact factors of journals in your field.

Additional information about Impact Factors

The Thomson Reuters Impact Factor
This essay was originally published in the Current Contents print editions June 20, 1994, when Thomson Scientific was known as The Institute for Scientific Information. It includes details on how to calculate an impact factor.

Remember that the Impact Factor is NOT intended to be used to assess performance of an individual researcher. See the message from the Thomson Reuters Citation Impact Center Preserving the Integrity of The Journal Impact Factor Guidelines from the Scientific Business of Thomson Reuters

Incites Essential Science Indicators (Institute for Scientific Information)
A comprehensive compilation of essential science performance statistics and science trends data derived from ISI’s databases. The chief indicators of output, or productivity, are journal article publication counts. It is a web-based research evaluation tool that allows you to analyze institutional productivity and benchmark your output against peers worldwide.

Publish or Perish

Publish or Perish is a free program that retrieves citations from Google Scholar and allows users to calculate:

• Total number of papers
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per paper
• Average number of citations per author
• Average number of papers per author
• Average number of citations per year
• Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
• The contemporary h-index
• The age-weighted citation rate
• Two variations of individual h-indices
• An analysis of the number of authors per paper

Altmetric Explorer
Altmetrics includes metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics. Altmetrics Explorer has been chosen by the University to showcase the attention and influence of the research of its staff and students. Altmetric Explorer can be accessed by using your university credentials.

Plos Altmetrics
PloS Altmetrics site has been developed to assist in capturing ways in which articles are disseminated throughout in the expanding scholarly ecosystem, and reach beyond the scope of traditional trackers and filters.

Do altmetrics work? Twitter and ten other social web services.
Thelwall M1, Haustein S, Larivière V, Sugimoto CR.
PLoS One 2013 May 28;8(5):e64841. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0064841. Print 2013.

Rise of 'Altmetrics' Revives Questions About How to Measure Impact of Research
By Jennifer Howard, June 3, 2013
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Additional information on altmetrics is here

Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) - Australian Research Council (ARC)
ERA evaluates the quality of the research undertaken in Australian universities against national and international benchmarks.  The ratings are determined and moderated by committees of distinguished researchers, drawn from Australia and overseas.  The unit of evaluation is broadly defined as the Field of Research (FoR) within an institution based on the Australia and New Zealand Standard Classification (ANZSRC). 

You will find previous ERA journal and conference ranking lists here, although this is not the official site. We are awaiting publication of the 2015 listings.

Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC)
The data collected through the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) is used to assess the relative research and research training performance of HEPs (higher education providers) and in turn drives the allocation of RBG (research block grants).

Figshare  has been chosen as the University of Adelaide's official data and digital object repository with unlimited local storage.. By contributing to Figshare you will:-

• Provide an accessible record of research data.

• Indicate who is working on what data collections.

• Enable discovery and reuse of data where appropriate.

• Enable connections between researchers.

Because Figshare is cloud-based, you can access it anywhere and at any time.

You may also be interested in other research data repositories, and re3data.org provides a directory of repositories.

It is generally conceded that having your publications in open access will make them accessible to a much wider audience than is possible through commercial publishing alone. Adelaide Research & Scholarship is the University's institutional digital depository, and material deposited there will be indexed by Google and other search engines

Adelaide Research and Scholarship also

• assists you in complying with NHMRC policy on dissemination of research findings
• provides a mechanism for generating author bibliographies

Consult their guide to help you make best use of their resources and services

Aurora (University of Adelaide Researcher Outputs, Reporting & Analytics) is the University's web-based system for capturing and reporting research publications and outputs.

Our Tech Services staff have now produced a useful series of videos which explain how to use the system.

Aurora uses SHERPA/RoMEO to find individual publisher's Copyright and self archiving policies. You can check yourself if you like.

From Aurora's home page:-

Aurora is designed to help reduce the time and effort spent on managing publication and research outputs across the University and offers a number of features to support researchers at the University of Adelaide:

• Streamlined, and in many cases, automated publications data entry

• Impact measurements, including H-indexes, citation counts and Altmetrics

• Easy export options to assist in the creation of publication lists for CVs, grants and promotion applications

• Collecting data for HERDC and ERA research performance exercises

• Uploading accurate publication information to the University's digital repository, Adelaide Research & Scholarship (AR&S)

Aurora also provides a range of reports allowing administrators to download and analyse publications for their school, faculty or research institute.