News Story

Responsible Research Metrics

Nancy Pontika, Wednesday 9 Mar 2016

At this year’s Jisc DigiFest Dr. Petr Knoth was invited to sit on a panel discussing Responsible Research Metrics. This panel was organised in the context of the recently published Metrics Tide report commissioned by HEFCE, which looked into issues surrounding the use of quantitative research metrics in REF. The other two panelists were Prof. Stephen Curry of Imperial College and Prof. Cameron Neylon of Curtin University.

In his talk, Petr argued for the need to develop a range of new research metrics that make use of article full-texts. We call these semantometrics. Petr also stressed that we need to move away from performance measures established axiomatically or ad-hoc without demonstrating their ability to capture aspects of research performance on data. These measures include especially the widely used higher-level metrics, such as the h-index. “We need to move towards data driven approaches to the development of research evaluation metrics“ he reiterated.