Erevnametrics: Rating what researchers do

We recently published a paper titled “Aggregated Erevnametrics: bringing together alt-metrics through Research Objects” and everyone, to my knowledge, who has read the title asks me the same question. “What are Erevnametrics?” Erevnametrics is a compound word taken from the Greek erevna (ερευνα) meaning research and metrics (μετρήσεις) meaning to measure. Therefore the meaning of erevnametrics is research measurements.

The thrust of our paper was that currently we bibliometrics to rate our research. Biblio (βιβλιο) from the greek meaning paper. So we currently rate our research using paper metrics. Any modern researcher will tell you there is far more research than simply the papers we produce. In fact writing a paper tends to be a very small but important part of a long term piece of work but that work is only rated on the strength of the eventual paper produced.

Obviously we rate existing research using bibliometrics for a number  of reasons, mainly because pre-www the papers we wrote were the only tangible assets of our research in the public space. This meant they were the only output third parties had by which to rate our research. The other reasons we use bibliometrics seem mainly to be convenience and convention which are both legitimate reasons. However we are now very much in the age of the web and more and more of our research outputs are available for all the world to see and base judgement on. We argue that if there are more aspects of the research to measure and these measurements are straight forward to make then the only reason to use bibliometrics instead of wider erevnametrics is convention.

If this sounds interesting or you have a comment to make why not read the paper on the Altmetrics website and leave us some feedback. http://altmetrics.org/workshop2011/mcsweeney-v0/