Jason Priem, UNC SILS Ph.D. Student and Co-PI Heather Piwowar, receive $125K Grant to Track the Impact of Scholarly Work on the Web

From a UNC School of Information and Library Science Announcement:

Jason Priem, a third-year doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and Heather Piwowar, a postdoctoral research associate at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, have been awarded a grant totaling $125,000 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundationfor their Total-Impact Web application.
Total-Impact is a project that allows users to view the impact of a wide range of research output via its Web site. According to the site, Total-Impact “goes beyond traditional measurements of research output – citations to papers – to embrace a much broader evidence of use across a wide range of scholarly output types. The system aggregates impact data from many sources and displays it in a single report.” The goal of the project is to track the impact of scholarly work using altmetrics, new metrics Priem, Piwowar and others are developing to track the impact of scholarly work on the Web, which sometimes includes social media such as blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook posts.
Total-Impact relates to Priem’s wider research in altmetrics, or alternative metrics that measure things other than journal citations or other academic measures. Noting the increasing inadequacy of traditional methods including peer review, citation analysis and the journal impact factor, he seeks to include information about the sharing of “raw science” (code, datasets) and self-publishing via blogs or Twitter, among ot
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According to the Total-Impact blog, over the next year the Sloan Foundation grant will enable the team to add new information sources, update the Web site’s user interfaces and work towards having upwards of 30,000 unique visitors to the site and at least 100 scholars embedding or linking to Total-Impact reports on their CV, among other milestones.

Read the Complete News Release
Visit the Total-Impact Web Site
See Also: Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online (by Jennifer Howard, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Published January 29, 2012.

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