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Scholarly Communication: More Bibliometrics information

This guide defines Scholarly Communication, and its role in raising visibility of Researcher output and web presence. Scholarly Communication is defined as "the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality,

Bibliometrics @ Rhodes

Wits Library has InCites software and other Bibliometric Tools to assist Wits academics with their research analytics.  If you would like a report on your citations, impact factors and other related research information, please ask your Branch Librarian to assist you, alternatively, contact Maryna.vandenHeever@wits.ac.za for an appointment. These reports are very useful for NRF ratings, CVs, interviews, comparisons, progress reports, etc.

About Citation Analysis and Impact factor

Altmetrics and open access – a measure of public interest

Altmetrics and open access – a measure of public interest

There is an interesting relationship between altmetrics and open access. One could even refer to altmetrics as open metrics. This is mainly due to the fact that altmetrics data uses open sources.

"For decades, the most common metric for evaluating research impact has been the number of times a research article is cited by other articles. This metric is sometimes represented by the raw count of citations received by the specific article in question or sometimes through an impact-by-association proxy – the number of citations received by the journal that published the article, summarized using a formula called the journal impact factor.

Citations are not the only way to represent the impact of a research article. A few alternative indicators have been the subjects of webometrics and bibliometrics research for years, including download counts and mentions in patents. However, as scholarly communication moves increasingly online, more indicators have become available: how many times an article has been bookmarked, blogged about, cited in Wikipedia and so on. These metrics can be considered altmetrics – alternative metrics of impact. (Appropriately enough, the term altmetrics was first proposed in a tweet [https:/twitter.com/asnpriem/status/25844968813].)"  Heather Piwowar

Heather Piwowar is a postdoc at Duke University, studying the adoption and use of open research data. She is also a co-founder of ImpactStory (http://impactstory.org/), an open-source web tool that helps scholars track and report the broader impacts of their research. @researchremix