Identifying Audiences of E-Infrastructures - Tools for Measuring Impact

Abstract

Research evaluation should take into account the intended scholarly and non-scholarly audiences of the research output. This holds too for research infrastructures, which often aim at serving a large variety of audiences. With research and research infrastructures moving to the web, new possibilities are emerging for evaluation metrics. This paper proposes a feasible indicator for measuring the scope of audiences who use web-based e-infrastructures, as well as the frequency of use. In order to apply this indicator, a method is needed for classifying visitors to e-infrastructures into relevant user categories. The paper proposes such a method, based on an inductive logic program and a Bayesian classifier. The method is tested, showing that the visitors are efficiently classified with 90% accuracy into the selected categories. Consequently, the method can be used to evaluate the use of the e-infrastructure within and outside academia.

Does Female-authored Research have More Educational Impact than Male-authored Research? Evidence from Mendeley

“…Professionals in some fields may also read academic research (Dawes & Sampson 2003;Hertzum & Pejtersen 2000), although it is not clear whether nonacademics form a substantial fraction of article readers in any subject. Indirect information about article downloaders inferred from their internet location can give some insights (Duin, King & Van Den Besselaar 2012) but is not definitive. Researchers are more likely to read articles authored by people in their own country (Thelwall & Maflahi 2015), presumably due to a combination of familiarity through proximity, co-authorship (e.g., Wallace, Larivière & Gingras 2012), or nation-specific shared topics (e.g., in law, economics, history, archaeology, botany, zoology, politics, health care policy).…”

Can Mendeley bookmarks reflect readership? A survey of user motivations

“…Although information about the types of user accessing articles could be used to identify why the articles were used (Thelwall, ), the identities of downloaders of papers are typically unknown due to confidentiality and privacy issues. This greatly hinders attempts to make inferences about types of impact from download information (Duin, King, & Van den Besselaar, ). In contrast, the social reference sharing site Mendeley provides data about those who have saved information about each article to their Mendeley library (called “bookmarking” here to distinguish it from reading, although this is not a strictly accurate term) and identifies their roles (e.g., professors, PhD students, masters students, and users outside academia).…”

Readership Data and Research Impact

“…Electronic usage data can sometimes incorporate information about the origins of the users from the internet address of their computers. It is therefore possible to break down the readers of an article by institution and country and perhaps also organization type, if this data is made available by publishers or web server operators (Duin, King, & Van Den Besselaar, 2012;Kurtz, Eichhorn, Accomazzi, Grant, Demleitner, Murray, et al, 2005). This can reveal where articles and journals have had impact.…”