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Computer Science & Information Systems: Bibliometrics/Altmetrics/H-Index

Welcome to the LibGuide for Computer Science and Information Systems. This Library Guide will provide you with a One Stop service to assist you in your studies or research at the NWU.

Be visible

Be visible or perish

Definitions

 

Bibliometric analysis use data on numbers and authors of scientific publications and on articles and the citations therein (and in patents) to measure the “output” of individuals/research teams, institutions, and countries, to identify national and international networks, and to map the development of new (multi-disciplinary) fields of science and technology.

Altmetrics  (Galliga, F. & Dyas-Correia, S.  2013.  Altmetrics: rethinking the way we measure.  Serials review, 39 (1): 56-61.)
Altmetrics are new measurements for the impact of scholarly content, based on how far and wide it travels through the social Web (like Twitter), social bookmarking (e.g. CiteULike) and collaboration tools (such as Mendeley) … What altmetrics hope to do is provide an alternative measure of impact, distinct from the Journal Impact Factor, which has been categorically misused and is unable to respond to the digital environment that scholarship takes place in today

H-Index
The index is based on the distribution of citations received by a given researcher's publications. Hirsch writes:

A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np − h) papers have no more than h citations each.

To manually calculate your h-index, organize articles in descending order, based on the number of times they have been cited e.g.
An author has 8 papers that have been cited 33, 30, 20, 15, 7, 6, 5 and 4 times. This tells us that the author's h-index is 6.

h-index calculation

What does an h-index of 6 mean?

  • An h-index of 6 means that this author has published at least 6 papers that have each received at least 6 citations.


More context:

  • The first paper has been cited 33 times, and gives us a 1 (there is one paper that has been cited at least once).
  • The second paper has been cited 30 times, and gives us a 2 (there are two papers that have been cited at least twice).
  • The third paper gives us a 3 and all the way up to 6 with the sixth highest paper.
  • The final two papers have no effect in this case as they have been cited less than six times (Ireland, MacDonald & Stirling, 2013).
    (Shannon Gordon, Univ of Waterloo library)

 

Altmetrics (Alternative metrics)

Altmetrics Tools and Software + tools to increase your visibility

Altmetric.com    +  Altmetric Explorer   Altmetric tracks what people are saying about papers online on behalf of publishers, authors, libraries and institutions.  The Altmetric Explorer lets you monitor, search and measure conversations about your publications and those of your competitors. Use the Explorer to deliver insights, track mentions and measure levels of attention over time. To start: download the Altmetric Bookmarklet  http://www.altmetric.com/bookmarklet.php

ResearchGate  Share your publications, access millions more, and publish your data.  Connect and collaborate with colleagues, peers, co-authors, and specialists in your field.  Get stats about views, downloads, and citations of your research.   Find the right job using research-focused job board, etc.

Publish or Perish  (Including H-Index)  Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar and (since release 4.1) + Microsoft Academic Search to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the metrics.

LinkedIn  the world's largest professional network with 250 million members in over 200 countries and territories around the globe.  Connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. When you join LinkedIn, you get access to people, jobs, news, updates, and insights that help you be great at what you do.

Academia.edu  Search people, Research interests and Universities.

Peer Evaluation     Peer evaluation is about giving Open Access to your primary data, working papers, articles, media and having them all reviewed and discussed by your peers.  - See more at: http://www.peerevaluation.org/about-peer-evaluation/#sthash.KxgZRL4a.dpuf

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)    SSRN is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences. 

PLoS Impact Explorer  This page mashes up alt-metrics data from Altmetric with articles from the Public Library of Science (PLoS).
Check which articles are seeing the most buzz from social media sites, newspapers and in online reference managers.

Scholarometer  Is a social tool to facilitate citation analysis and help evaluate the impact of an author's publications.

Microsoft Academic Search    Provides Author metrics + Article metrics

Research Blogging   Allows readers to easily find blog posts about serious peer-reviewed research, instead of just news reports and press releases.

SlideShare  Upload and share publicly or privately PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF Portfolios. 

Facebook   An online networking service.  Connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.

Altmetrics for Scopus.  Can be found in the abstract view of an article, below the Related Documents box in the right-hand column.  Altmetrics for Scopus will only appear when data is available.