Hello everyone,

 

I am hoping some of you might have some good ideas on looking at metrics/citations for departments that do not fit the ‘general template’.

 

Here at University of Essex we mainly use Scopus and SciVal to look at bibliometrics. At the moment we are looking at ways to improve how we look at bibliometrics in order to accommodate to departments that are in more niche areas. However, we find it difficult to do this without making the process extremely time consuming or not in line with responsible metrics (plus, we are limited both in terms of people and software!). So I want to openly ask for advice.

 

We have been experimenting a little with one of the departments, Psychosocial and Psychoanalytical Studies – a very small department with research in niche areas but have not yet been able to find a good way of looking at bibliometrics accurately, and we have tried a few things:

 

 

We’ve tried	Benefits	Downsides
Creating a group of researchers in SciVal	Somewhat accurate way of looking at output from a department	·         Includes publications that should not be there as they are linked to other affiliations ·         Time consuming, especially if benchmarking ·         Relevant work/researchers can be excluded because these individuals are not included in our HR system (e.g. students) or in the list of staff for other institutions.
Creating a ‘bespoke’ research area using specific keywords	Accurate representation of publications at University of Essex within a certain research area	·         LOADS of ‘dirty data’ when benchmarking ·         Not an accurate representation of other institutions performance in the field as we have defined the field by our own expertise. ·         Difficult and time consuming to maintain
Filtering down to subject areas in SciVal	Quick and easy	·         HIGHLY flawed and does not represent department at all.

 

 

Does any of you have any good ways of looking at bibliometrics for a niche department (both by itself and benchmarking)? Though we are using Scopus/SciVal at the moment I highly welcome techniques and methods from other products/software, both free and under subscription.

 

Happy to summarise for the list as well as I am assuming we are not the only ones trying to find a solution to this!

 

Thank you,

Kat

 

Katrine Sundsbo

Scholarly Communications and Research Support Manager

Library Services

University of Essex

 

T 01206 873153

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