Scholarometer: a social framework for analyzing impact across disciplines

PLoS One. 2012;7(9):e43235. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043235. Epub 2012 Sep 12.

Abstract

The use of quantitative metrics to gauge the impact of scholarly publications, authors, and disciplines is predicated on the availability of reliable usage and annotation data. Citation and download counts are widely available from digital libraries. However, current annotation systems rely on proprietary labels, refer to journals but not articles or authors, and are manually curated. To address these limitations, we propose a social framework based on crowdsourced annotations of scholars, designed to keep up with the rapidly evolving disciplinary and interdisciplinary landscape. We describe a system called Scholarometer, which provides a service to scholars by computing citation-based impact measures. This creates an incentive for users to provide disciplinary annotations of authors, which in turn can be used to compute disciplinary metrics. We first present the system architecture and several heuristics to deal with noisy bibliographic and annotation data. We report on data sharing and interactive visualization services enabled by Scholarometer. Usage statistics, illustrating the data collected and shared through the framework, suggest that the proposed crowdsourcing approach can be successful. Secondly, we illustrate how the disciplinary bibliometric indicators elicited by Scholarometer allow us to implement for the first time a universal impact measure proposed in the literature. Our evaluation suggests that this metric provides an effective means for comparing scholarly impact across disciplinary boundaries.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Authorship
  • Crowdsourcing / standards*
  • Entropy
  • Information Dissemination
  • Interdisciplinary Studies / standards*
  • Journal Impact Factor*
  • Publications
  • Software
  • Statistics as Topic
  • Time Factors

Grants and funding

The authors acknowledge support from Hongfei Lin at Dalian University of Technology, the China Scholarship Council, Massimo Marchiori at University of Padua, the University of Bologna, the Lilly Endowment, and National Science Foundation (award IIS-0811994) for funding the computing infrastructure that hosts the Scholarometer service. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.