Exploring alternative cyberbibliometrics for evaluation of scholarly performance in the social sciences and humanities in Taiwan

• Published in: American Society for Information Science and Technology. Meeting. Proceedings of the ... ASIST Annual Meeting 2012, Vol.49 (1), p.1-1
• Main Authors: Tang, Muh-chyun, Wang, Chun-mei, Chen, Kuang-hua, Hsiang, Jieh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Awards; Documents; English language; Grants; Humanities; Indicators; Islands; Meetings; Performance evaluation; Social sciences
• ISSN: 0044-7870; 1550-8390; 1550-8390
• DOI: 10.1002/meet.14504901060

Research output and impact metrics derived from commercial citation databases such as Web of Science and Scopus have become commonly used indicators of predominantly English language scholarly performance. Yet it has been pointed out that existing metrics are largely inadequate to reflect scholars' overall peer‐mediated performance, especially in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) where publication forms are more diverse. In this paper alternative metrics exploring a variety of communication sources were explored, with the aim of better reflecting SSH scholarship. Data for a group of 16 SSH scholars resident on Taiwan were collected, along with the number of grants and awards received from the chief public grantmaking body for the sciences on the island. Principle component analysis revealed four underlying dimensions represented by the 18 metrics. Multiple‐regression analyses were performed to examine how well each of the metrics and dimensions predicted the number of public grants awarded the study cohorts. Differences in the significance of the predictors were found between the social sciences and humanities. The results suggest the need to consider disciplinary differences when evaluating scholarly performance.