title: Scholarometer: a social framework for analyzing impact across disciplines.
abstract: The use of quantitative metrics to gauge the impact of scholarly publications, authors, and disciplines is predicated on the availability of reliable usage and annotation data. Citation and download counts are widely available from digital libraries. However, current annotation systems rely on proprietary labels, refer to journals but not articles or authors, and are manually curated. To address these limitations, we propose a social framework based on crowdsourced annotations of scholars, designed to keep up with the rapidly evolving disciplinary and interdisciplinary landscape. We describe a system called Scholarometer, which provides a service to scholars by computing citation-based impact measures. This creates an incentive for users to provide disciplinary annotations of authors, which in turn can be used to compute disciplinary metrics. We first present the system architecture and several heuristics to deal with noisy bibliographic and annotation data. We report on data sharing and interactive visualization services enabled by Scholarometer. Usage statistics, illustrating the data collected and shared through the framework, suggest that the proposed crowdsourcing approach can be successful. Secondly, we illustrate how the disciplinary bibliometric indicators elicited by Scholarometer allow us to implement for the first time a universal impact measure proposed in the literature. Our evaluation suggests that this metric provides an effective means for comparing scholarly impact across disciplinary boundaries.
authors.affiliation: Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, United States of America. jakaur@indiana.edu
authors.forename: Jasleen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kaur
authors.forename: Diep Thi
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Hoang
authors.forename: Xiaoling
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.forename: Lino
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Possamai
authors.forename: Mohsen
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Jafariasbagh
authors.forename: Snehal
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Patil
authors.forename: Filippo
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Menczer
mesh_terms: D001319:Authorship; D063045:Crowdsourcing / Q000592:standards*; D019277:Entropy; D033181:Information Dissemination; D058025:Interdisciplinary Studies / Q000592:standards*; D055811:Journal Impact Factor; D011642:Publications; D012984:Software; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D013997:Time Factors