4 March 2013 2 - 4pm:

To support UQ Schools undergoing formal review in 2013, UQ Library is hosting an information session to demonstrate how to get the most out of research publication data.

In a recent announcement from Thomson Reuters the Book Citation Index is expanding, with a new partnerships arrangements with top publishers such as Elsevier, Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of Chicago Press.

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

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) for 2011 has been released. Journal Citation Reports uses Web of Science citation data to evaluate and compare scholarly journals. The 2011 release features the largest-ever JCR with 10,677 journal listings in 232 disciplines; 2,552 publishers from 82 countries are represented. A total of 528 journals receive their first Journal Impact Factor in this latest JCR release.

Research news this week in The Conversation reported that

With research impact the Holy Grail for many researchers, the notion that one's work could be widely read and carefully saved yet be rarely cited is probably heartbreaking news.

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.

With the use of metrics of all kinds on the rise - in applications for grants, promotion, and tenure - the notion that impact factors can be gamed is worrying, if hardly surprising.

A new article in Science, Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing, looks at how the manipulation works and how widespread it might be.

The authors state: