Can Personal Web Pages that Link to Universities Yield Information about the Wider Dissemination of Research?

The growth of the Web has made available a vast collection of informal publishing by individual citizens who previously would not have had access to a media outlet to express their opinions. We investigate personal pages to see whether these are capable of giving new insights into the relationship between the public and universities. A collection of 2763 personal pages hosted by private Internet Service Providers that link to the UK academic domain was investigated. On a macro level there was a clear pattern for universities with higher research productivity to attract more links from personal pages but manual inspection of a random sample showed that this was not directly caused by their research content. Reasons found for linking were varied, with over a quarter associated with purely recreational activities. The results indicate that at present global counts of links from personal home pages can be used for (a) triangulation purposes to confirm patterns found in inter-university links and (b) to assess the embedding of academics (but not their research) in the wider community. They should not be used to assess the dissemination of research to the public, however, without first classifying link targets. The 19% of pages linking to research nevertheless illustrate the wide potential range of uses that different sectors of society can make of online academic research, and indicate that useful public-university relationship information may be found for individual high-profile topical issues.

Figshare: a universal repository for academic resource sharing?

Purpose

– A number of subject-orientated and general websites have emerged to host academic resources. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the uptake of such services in order to decide which depositing strategies are effective and should be encouraged.

Design/methodology/approach

– This paper evaluates the views and shares of resources in the generic repository Figshare by subject category and resource type.

Findings

– Figshare use and common resource types vary substantially by subject category but resources can be highly viewed even in subjects with few members. More active subject areas do not tend to have more viewed or shared resources.

Research limitations/implications

– The view counts and share counts analysed may reflect author accesses or may be spammed.

Practical implications

– Limited uptake of Figshare within a subject area should not be a barrier to its use. Several highly successful innovative uses for Figshare show that it can reach beyond a purely academic audience.

Originality/value

– This is the first analysis of the uptake and use of a generic academic resource sharing repository.

Alternative metric indicators for funding scheme evaluations

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential of altmetric and webometric indicators to aid with funding agencies’ evaluations of their funding schemes.

Design/methodology/approach

– This paper analyses a range of altmetric and webometric indicators in terms of suitability for funding scheme evaluations, compares them to traditional indicators and reports some statistics derived from a pilot study with Wellcome Trust-associated publications.

Findings

– Some alternative indicators have advantages to usefully complement scientometric data by reflecting a different type of impact or through being available before citation data.

Research limitations/implications

– The empirical part of the results is based on a single case study and does not give statistical evidence for the added value of any of the indicators.

Practical implications

– A few selected alternative indicators can be used by funding agencies as part of their funding scheme evaluations if they are processed in ways that enable comparisons between data sets. Their evidence value is only weak, however.

Originality/value

– This is the first analysis of altmetrics or webometrics from a funding scheme evaluation perspective.

The megaphone of the people? Spanish SentiStrength for real-time analysis of political tweets

Twitter is an important platform for sharing opinions about politicians, parties and political decisions. These opinions can be exploited as a source of information to monitor the impact of politics on society. This article analyses the sentiment of 2,704,523 tweets referring to Spanish politicians and parties from a month in 2014–2015. The article makes three specific contributions: (a) enriching SentiStrength, a fast unsupervised sentiment strength detection system, for Spanish political tweeting; (b) analysing how linguistic phenomena such as negation, idioms and character duplication influence Spanish sentiment strength detection accuracy; and (c) analysing Spanish political tweets to rank political leaders, parties and personalities for popularity. Sentiment in Twitter for key politicians broadly reflects the main official polls for popularity but not for voting intention. In addition, the data suggests that the primary role of Twitter in politics is to select and amplify political events published by traditional media.

Why do papers have many Mendeley readers but few Scopus-indexed citations and vice versa?

Counts of citations to academic articles are widely used as indicators of their scholarly impact. In addition, alternative indicators derived from social websites have been proposed to cover some of the shortcomings of citation counts. The most promising such indicator is counts of readers of an article in the social reference sharing site Mendeley. Although Mendeley reader counts tend to correlate strongly and positively with citation counts within scientific fields, an understanding of causes of citation-reader anomalies is needed before Mendeley reader counts can be used with confidence as indicators. In response, this article proposes a list reasons for anomalies based upon an analysis of articles that are highly cited but have few Mendeley readers, or vice versa. The results show that there are both technical and legitimate reasons for differences, with the latter including communities that use research but do not cite it in Scopus-indexed publications or do not use Mendeley. The results also suggest that the lower of the two values (citation counts, reader counts) tends to underestimate of the impact of an article and so taking the maximum is a reasonable strategy for a combined impact indicator.

Arts and humanities research evaluation: no metrics please, just data

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to make an explicit case for the use of data with contextual information as evidence in arts and humanities research evaluations rather than systematic metrics.

Design/methodology/approach

– A survey of the strengths and limitations of citation-based indicators is combined with evidence about existing uses of wider impact data in the arts and humanities, with particular reference to the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework.

Findings

– Data are already used as impact evidence in the arts and humanities but this practice should become more widespread.

Practical implications

– Arts and humanities researchers should be encouraged to think creatively about the kinds of data that they may be able to generate in support of the value of their research and should not rely upon standardised metrics.

Originality/value

– This paper combines practices emerging in the arts and humanities with research evaluation from a scientometric perspective to generate new recommendations.