The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in support of a two-year project that will investigate metrics derived from the network-based usage of scholarly information. The Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team of the LANL Research Library will carry out the project. Johan Bollen is the Principal Investigator, Herbert Van de Sompel serves as an architectural consultant, and Aric Hagberg of the LANL Mathematical Modeling and Analysis group serves as modeling consultant. Marko A. Rodriguez, PhD student at the University of California Santa Cruz and LANL Graduate Research Assistant, supports the project's research and development.
The project's major objective is enriching the toolkit used for the assessment of the impact of scholarly communication items, and hence of scholars, with metrics that derive from usage data. The project will start with the creation of a semantic model of scholarly communication, and an associated large-scale semantic store that relates a range of scholarly bibliographic, citation and usage data obtained from a variety of sources. Next, an investigation into the definition and validation of usage-based metrics will be conducted on the basis of this comprehensive collection. Finally, the defined metrics will be cross-validated, resulting in the formulation of guidelines and recommendations for future applications of metrics derived from scholarly usage data.
M. Rodriguez, J. Bollen, and H. de Sompel. JCDL '07: Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Digital libraries, page 278--287. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)