Chris and I delivered a session entitled “Metrics: what they are and how to use them” today as part of the Research Career Development Programme at the OU. It was really enjoyable and we got some great engagement from the audience.
You can access our script/notes for the session here:
Metrics-what they are and how to use them-script-October 2016
The main takeaways from the session were:
- Different databases can give different metric scores (i.e. a citation count for an article in Web of Science may not be the same as in Google Scholar)
- Different databases provide different metrics
- Metrics can be flawed and misleading, you need to understand how they work to engage with them fully
- Curate your author profiles (e.g. in Scopus, ORCID, ResearchGate etc.) to ensure metrics about you are more accurate
- Different author profile system offer different functionality, depending on their aims
- It is not clear how metrics will be used in the next REF yet
When asked what they thought about metrics at the beginning of the session, there were attendees who commented on the fact there are numerous metrics out there (which can be confusing!), that metrics appear to be simple (but are not really), that metrics need to be understood and interpreted to make them useful and that metrics can help with literature searches.
When asked what they thought about metrics again at the end of the session, comments focused on the fact that metrics show what research is popular but not what is high quality. It was also asked whether the REF needed its own metric rather than relying on existing metrics.
Thanks to everyone who attended and please be aware that we are running the session again on Wednesday December 7th from 2-3.30pm. To book a place, please email library-training@open.ac.uk