Three practical field normalised alternative indicator formulae for research evaluation

TL;DR

This paper introduces three field-normalized alternative indicators for research evaluation, addressing data collection challenges and enabling easier, cost-effective benchmarking of research impact using web-based metrics.

Contribution

It presents new field normalization formulas and a sampling strategy, along with free software, to simplify and reduce costs in research impact assessment using altmetrics.

Findings

Mendeley readers are more precise than citations for recent articles.

Significant differences in impact were found across funders and metrics.

Research funded by Wellcome, NIH, and MRC shows above-average Wikipedia impact.

Abstract

Although altmetrics and other web-based alternative indicators are now commonplace in publishers' websites, they can be difficult for research evaluators to use because of the time or expense of the data, the need to benchmark in order to assess their values, the high proportion of zeros in some alternative indicators, and the time taken to calculate multiple complex indicators. These problems are addressed here by (a) a field normalisation formula, the Mean Normalised Log-transformed Citation Score (MNLCS) that allows simple confidence limits to be calculated and is similar to a proposal of Lundberg, (b) field normalisation formulae for the proportion of cited articles in a set, the Equalised Mean-based Normalised Proportion Cited (EMNPC) and the Mean-based Normalised Proportion Cited (MNPC), to deal with mostly uncited data sets, (c) a sampling strategy to minimise data collection costs, and (d) free unified software to gather the raw data, implement the sampling strategy, and calculate the indicator formulae and confidence limits. The approach is demonstrated (but not fully tested) by comparing the Scopus citations, Mendeley readers and Wikipedia mentions of research funded by Wellcome, NIH, and MRC in three large fields for 2013-2016. Within the results, statistically significant differences in both citation counts and Mendeley reader counts were found even for sets of articles that were less than six months old. Mendeley reader counts were more precise than Scopus citations for the most recent articles and all three funders could be demonstrated to have an impact in Wikipedia that was significantly above the world average.