Various academic institutions in North America, Europe and Asia have signed up to Institutional Edition, a new data dashboard from Mendeley, a UK-based startup. The dashboard analyses the research activity and impact on the global research community in real time - down from the 3-5 year time lag of the "Impact Factor", the current gold standard for such evaluations.
This reportedly allows academic institutions to react faster to their faculty’s research needs and provide them with quicker, more personalised support during the research process. This in turn is seen to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.
The Impact Factor, a measure of the number of citations an academic journal receives, is a pivotal metric of science: Academics have to publish in high-Impact Factor journals to receive promotions, tenure, or grant funding, and universities allocate their million-dollar library budgets to those same high-Impact Factor journals. This is despite the Impact Factor's many known flaws - the most limiting of which is that the citations it is based on take 3-5 years to accumulate.
The latest release of Mendeley's Institutional Edition, distributed by Dutch library subscriptions agent Swets, seeks to bring research impact measurement to real-time speed, while also providing more granular and social metrics of how academic research is consumed, discussed and annotated. It allows research institutions to see detailed analytics of the journals their academics are reading, the journals they are publishing in, and how many readers those publications have. This data is built on Mendeley's global research community of more than 1.8 million academics who are using the startup's tools for document management, discovery and collaboration.
In a bid to develop alternatives to the Impact Factor, new research metrics startups such as altmetric.com and total-impact.org have already turned to Mendeley's readership data, and several peer-reviewed studies have recently highlighted its positive correlation with the Impact Factor.
