Tenurometer/Concept
Tenurometer: Learning about an author should be easy
- Why a citation analysis tool?
If you give Tenurometer (tenurometer.indiana.edu) an author's name, it will give you his/her articles and measures of academic impact based on latest data from Google Scholar. We plan to offer widely adopted metrics for analyzing author impact, such as the h-index proposed by Hirsch in 2005 and several extensions. Such tool will benefit not only scholars, by empowering them to present the impact of their work, but also academic reviewers and administrators, by providing convenience and transparency during hiring, funding, tenure, and promotion processes.
- Why Google Scholar data?
Though there are known limitations to the quality and coverage of Google Scholar data due to its crawling origin and automatic text processing, Google Scholar is the largest publicly available collection of publication and citation data. This approach avoids duplication of effort in collecting and maintaining the data.
- Why a Firefox extension?
A server-based approach would violate Google Scholar?s usage policy, and Google blocks IP addresses that generate a large number of requests to Google Scholar. Due to the same origin policy and the fact that Google Scholar does not provide an API, one could not leverage Ajax technology to build such web service either. The solution is a client-based approach, which could be implemented as a stand-alone application or as a browser extension. We believe that the latter will provide greater flexibility, extensibility, portability, and ease of deployment. Queries to Google Scholar will depart from the user?s browser, and the results will be presented in the browser. The browser will simply visualize the data in a richer, more interactive way, and provide additional data. After Google Scholar delivers the results about an author to the browser, the rest (exchanging data between the browser and web server for further annotation and data collection) is done by Ajax. This approach also allows a social, Web2.0 annotation process by which users can annotate results (authors) with discipline tags. The resulting metadata will be shared with the research community and lead to analyses of scientific collaboration dynamics, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary.
- Why Mozilla Jetpack?
When we began working on the Tenurometer project, we did not know about Mozilla Jetpack. It was painful to adjust the interface design by editing XUL code and implement functions by pure JavaScript. This also made us hesitant about implementing new ideas into the tool. Upon learning about the Jetpack platform, we got excited about getting to know how building Tenurometer with Jetpack could allow us to focus on better design and additional functionality. We look forward to the opportunity to make Tenurometer more extensible, that is, more open to new ideas.
- What are the main features?
1. Calculate well-established impact measures (h index, g index) for an author based on latest information about his/her articles returned by Google Scholar. 2. Present articles by an author in a simple but informative layout, through which one can rectify Google Scholar results (by remove/merge) and see recalculated metrics. 3. Let user label author with discipline tag(s), then collect this data to calculate the new universal h_f index.
- Whom are we targeting?
1. Authors: in presenting their work 2. Administrators: in reviewing a candidate?s academic profile 3. Students and anyone who are interested in the publications and productivity of an author
- How can the tool and service be extended?
With the power of the new platform, we are hoping that it will be easy to implement new functions such as: - start the search by right clicking any name on a web page - save the rectified profile of an author for future reference - make it simpler for a user to add discipline tag(s), e.g., on the result page, or complement a profile with other information, e.g., homepage, comments, location, links to related resources, etc.
- What will make us different?
Compared to other tools for citation analysis (Publish or Perish by Anne-Wil Harzing, ScHolar index by Nicolas Roussel, citations-gadget by Jan Feyereisl), Tenurometer, as a Firefox extension, is neither restricted to any operating system nor violating any policy. Besides, - We can compute for the first time the universal h_f index by leveraging socially collected discipline statistics - We let users share their knowledge - We will build a collaboration network among disciplines from user contributed data
- Who are we?
- Diep Thi Hoang Project owner, designer, main developer Graduate Student Computer Science Program School of Informatics and Computing http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dihoang/
- Filippo Menczer Project owner, designer, developer Associate Professor School of Informatics and Computing http://cnets.indiana.edu/people/filippo-menczer
