New Research Article: “Scholarometer: A Social Framework for Analyzing Impact across Disciplines”

Title

Scholarometer: A Social Framework for Analyzing Impact across Disciplines

Authors

Jasleen Kaur
Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington
Diep Thi Hoang
University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University
Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington
Lino Possamai
Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington
University of Padua, Padua, Italy
Xiaoling Sun
Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, China
Mohsen Jafari Asbagh
Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington
Snehal Patil
Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington
Filippo Menczer
Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington

Source

PLOS One

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.

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