Scrutiny of scholarly publications and research data has traditionally been undertaken through peer review and proprietary bibliometrics. But should article level metrics alone be used to evaluate the impact of research? Increasingly practitioners are turning to social networks such as blogs, Twitter and Mendeley to assess the scholarly impact of published works.

Simon Marginson reported in The Australian this week, "We're fighting above our weight when it comes to uni ranking". The article examines how Australian Universities compare within the global rankings.

David Glance, Director of the Centre for Software Practices at University of Western Australia wrote in The Conversation on the 8th July 2012, a thought provoking article on the long tail of academic publishing. The main point being, that the high publication rates of a few high achieving academics is generally matched by the many academics with modest outputs and that universities should not overlook th

In early June, the Repositories Support Project (RSP) held an interesting and well-received event on "Scholarly Communications: New Developments in Open Access." The event was attended by librarians, repositories specialists, research officers and copyright consultants. Presentations were held on open access, social media, data citation, and research networking.

The UK-based Developing Research Excellence and Methods (DREaM) group aims to develop a network of library and information science researchers by bringing them together at five events over the 18-month duration of the project.

Web of Science' s Book Citation Index is now available!

The world's only citation index for scholarly books, the Book Citation Index closes the citation gap in the sciences, social science, and arts and humanities.

MyRI is a self-paced tutorial on tools that help you measure your research impact. You can view the modules online or download them. The material is licensed open access. There are also tailored materials for computer science and geography.

There are currently 3 modules available:

The latest Journal Citations Reports®* have recently been released by Thomson Reuters.

The 2010 release features the largest ever JCR with 10,196 journal listings in 238 disciplines of Science and Social Sciences. 2,494 publishers from 84 countries are represented, some for the first time. A total of 1,075 journals receive their first Journal Impact Factor in the latest JCR release.

(Thomson Reuters press release)

The 2010 Journal Citations Reports (JCR) have just been released.

Librarians can support researchers through all stages of their research process. This includes providing advice on the information aspects of research, helping researchers stay up to date with research in their discipline ares, developing collections to meet their research needs, advising on open access and data management, and helping researchers to make the most of bibliographic management tools such as EndNote and a range of other online tools which can improve the processes of discovering, gathering, creating and sharing information.