'No One Measure to Rule Them All:' Teaching JIF Alternatives

Background: The presenter developed a new workshop titled "Research Impact Demystified" to educate both faculty and students on research impact metrics. Objectives include identifying examples, purpose, and limitations of both common and alternative metrics and understanding the difference between journal, article, and author level metrics. The goal of the workshop is to help researchers locate and compile the correct metrics for their purpose and to increase their impact by improving the communication and reach of their work through the use of scholarly profiles and author identifiers.

Description: The impetus for this new workshop was non-renewal of the library's subscription to Web of Science and the Journal Citation Reports, upon which many faculty are reliant for the Journal Impact Factor in particular. The workshop and related research guide are organized around three bibliometric analysis levels: article, author, and journal. By building from raw citation counts at the article level to more complex calculations such as journal rankings learners may easily follow the logic of many impact metrics. In addition to biweekly webinar sessions, in the first month of advertising and offering the workshop three departments have requested presentations for both graduate student and faculty audiences. Attendees to the webinar are asked to complete a post-session survey to measure general feedback. Future course-integrated sessions will be evaluated on the stated learning objectives through a pre- and post-survey.

Conclusion: The workshop will be evaluated on the stated learning objectives: identifying examples, purpose, and limitations of both common and alternative metrics; sources for research impact metrics; understanding journal vs article vs author level metrics; choosing and compiling the correct metrics for the purpose; and tracking and enhancing research visibility with online profiles and scholarly identifiers. Additionally, the author anticipates that faculty use of Scopus source metrics and scholarly profiles such as ORCID will increase and will measure this usage where possible in order to target future outreach and service efforts.