Libraries, repositories and metric research evaluation (pre-print, free download)

["Armbruster, Chris" <Chris.Armbruster@EUI.eu>]

ACCESS, USAGE AND CITATION METRICS: WHAT FUNCTION FOR DIGITAL 
LIBRARIES AND REPOSITORIES IN RESEARCH EVALUATION?

The growth and increasing complexity of global science poses a 
grand challenge to scientists: How to organise the worldwide 
evaluation of research programmes and peers? For the 21st century 
we need not just information on science, but also meta-level 
scientific information that is delivered to the digital workbench 
of every researcher. Access, usage and citation metrics will be 
one major information service that researchers will need on an 
everyday basis to handle the complexity of science.

Scientometrics has been built on centralised commercial databases 
of high functionality but restricted scope, mainly providing 
information that may be used for research assessment.

Enter digital libraries and repositories: Can they collect 
reliable metadata at source, ensure universal metric coverage and 
defray costs? This systematic appraisal of the future role of 
digital libraries and repositories for metric research evaluation 
proceeds by investigating the practical inadequacies of current 
metric evaluation before defining the scope for libraries and 
repositories as new players. Subsequently the notion of metrics 
as research information services is developed. Finally, the 
future relationship between a) libraries and repositories and b) 
metrics databases, commercial or non-commercial, is addressed.

Services reviewed include: Leiden Ranking, Webometrics Ranking of 
World Universities, COUNTER, MESUR, Harzing POP, CiteSeer, 
Citebase, RePEc LogEc and CitEc, Scopus, Web of Science and 
Google Scholar.

         http://ssrn.com/abstract=1088453

I should be particularly grateful if readers could point out any errors 
or misconceptions on my part.

Chris Armbruster