Measuring scientific impact beyond academia: an assessment of existing impact metrics and proposed improvements

摘要: How does scientific research affect the world around us? Being able to answer this question is of great importance in order appropriately channel efforts and resources science. The impact by scientists academia currently measured citation based metrics such as h-index, i-index counts. These academic aim represent dissemination knowledge among rather than on wider world. In work we are interested measuring beyond academia, economy, society, health legislation (comprehensive impact). Indeed asked demonstrate evidence comprehensive authoring case studies context Research Excellence Framework (REF). We first investigate extent which existing can be indicative impact. have collected all recent REF from 2014 linked these papers networks that constructed derived CiteSeerX, arXiv PubMed Central using a number text processing information retrieval techniques. demonstrated citation-based for measurement do not correlate well with results. also consider online attention surrounding works, those provided Altmetric API. argue evaluate non-academic need mine much set resources, including social media posts, press releases, news articles political debates stemming work. provide our data free reusable collection further analysis, network correspondence between studies, grant applications literature.