Modernising Research Monitoring in Europe: Impact and attention assessment across the research spectrum
May 19, 2014 - Brussels, Belgium
May 19, 2014 - Brussels, Belgium
The tracking of the use of research has become central to the measurement of research impact. While historically this tracking has meant using citations to published papers, the results are old, biased, and inaccessible – and stakeholders need current data to make funding decisions. We can do much better. Today’s users of research interact with that research online. This leaves an unprecedented data trail that can provide detailed data on the attention that specific research outputs, institutions, or domains receive.
However, while the promise of real time information is tantalizing, the collection of this data is outstripping our knowledge of how best to use it, our understanding of its utility across differing research domains and our ability to address the privacy and confidentiality issues. This is particularly true in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences, which have historically been under represented in the collection of scientific corpora of citations, and which are now under represented by the tools and analysis approaches being developed to track the use and attention received by STM research outputs.
We will convene a meeting that combines a discussion of the state of the art in one way in which research impact can be measured - Article Level and Altmetrics - with a critical analysis of current gaps and identification of ways to address them in the context of Humanities and Social Sciences. The discussion will identify the opportunities generated by new types of data, but at the same time identify coverage issues, document lessons learned from the heterogeneity of services used by research users in different domains and geographies, lay out the privacy and confidentiality landscape and identify ways in which altmetrics can be used to inform the growing body of data on the process by which research outputs are funded and produced.
The workshop will generate a report that summarises the state of the art and identifies the opportunities and gaps in the overall data landscape. The report will propose specific actions in the European context including data provision, policy initiatives and integration approaches that enable sophisticated analysis while respecting issues of privacy and information security. The report will provide a basis for developing the structures, data availability and communities necessary to support the development of a viable Research Monitoring system for Europe and beyond.
| 10:45 | Welcome and Introduction |
| 11:00 | Introduction to the European research policy and funding environment |
| 11:30 | Collecting and managing structured data on the research system: EuroCRIS and Cerif |
| 12:00 | State of the art in collecting and analyzing Article Level and Alt-metrics data |
| 12:30 | Collecting and modeling large scale data on the research system |
| 13:00 | Lunch |
| 14:00 | State of the art in Privacy and Confidentiality |
| 14:30 | Gaps, challenges, and opportunities in the data environment – Humanities and Social Sciences |
| 15:00 | Gaps, challenges, and opportunities in the data environment – Cultural studies and law |
| 15:30 | Coffee |
| 16:00 | Gaps, challenges, and opportunities in the data environment – Geography and culture |
| 16:30 | Discussion, actions and coordination |
| 17:30 | Close |