Bibliometrics
Clearly communicating and disseminating research results to the general public, and to the research community, is essential for fundamental research to be seen as having Societal Value and to truly translate into positive Societal Impact. Accurate metrics of research output -- preprints, peer-reviewed conference proceedings, peer-reviewed journal articles, data sharing and code sharing -- are necessary if we as a community are to meaningfully work toward clearer and broader communication of research.
Bibliometrics
1. NIH's National Library of Medicine's National Center for Biotechnology Information maintains PubMed, which has been the workhorse for decades for biomedical literature.
2. Alphabet's Google maintains Google Scholar, which over the past decade has become the workhorse spanning the literature across all disciplines making it particularly useful for interdisciplinary / multidisciplinary areas such as biomedical engineering, computational neuroscience and BCIs.
3. NIH's Office of Portfolio Analysis has relatively recently introduced iCite, which is a tool to access a dashboard of bibliometrics for papers. iCite has three modules producing three sets of metrics: Influence, Translation, and Open Citations.
- iCite: Influence provides Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) values, which measure the scientific influence of each paper by field- and time-adjusting the citations it has received, and benchmarking to the median for NIH publications, the value of which is set at 1.0. Read about how RCR is calculated at PLOS Biology.
- iCite: Translation measures how Human, Animal, or Molecular/Cellular Biology-oriented each paper is, and uses this information to track and predict citation by clinical articles. Read about how the Approximate Potential to Translate (APT), a machine learning-based estimate of the likelihood that a paper will be cited in later clinical trials/guidelines is calculated at PLOS Biology.
- iCite: Citations disseminates link-level, public-domain citation data from the NIH Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC). Read about the NIH-OCC at PLOS Biology.
Figs.1-4 show the RCR distribution for all NIH supported journal articles and also for all articles irrespective of funding source (Fig.1), the iCite: Influence RCR metrics for our papers excluding conference proceedings as per standard practice (Fig. 2), the iCite: Translation metrics for our papers without conference proceedings (Fig. 3) and the iCite: Citations metrics for our papers without conference proceedings (Fig. 4). These are our iCite metrics, as of 2/27/22, excluding conference proceedings as per standard practice.
4. Finally, thousands of conversations about scholarly content happen online every day. Altmetric tracks a range of sources to capture and collate this activity, enabling monitoring and reporting on the attention surrounding a research report. This metric is widely used by publishers (e.g., Nature). For example, Willett et al. Nature 2021 has an Altmetric score 4,399 (on 2/27/22), which is in the top 1% of comparable articles across the literature and across comparable articles in Nature.
