While online publishing has the advantage of making an author's work instantly available to millions of people, it also diminishes the author's ability to gauge the impact of that work. Tim Brody, a Ph.D. candidate at the U.K.'s University of Southampton, has been working with a new field called Digitometrics, which combines the results from citation analysis with Web logs. By counting the number of times an article has been downloaded, it's possible to get an idea of its impact. Brody has set up a citation analysis service called Citebase, based on the content in arXiv, a physics subject archive. He anticipates numerous similar services springing up in the Open Access environment. One of the most important aspects of Digitometrics, says Brody, is that it will shift analysts' focus from rating journals to rating specific articles. This in turn may lead to a system of looking for patterns to predict the future impact of an article.
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:05 AM
