Metrics Literacy
Alyssa Jeffrey
Alyssa Jeffrey is a first year master's student in the School of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is working for Stefanie Haustein as a research assistant in her work in scholarly communication, bibliometrics, and altmetrics. Alyssa completed her undergraduate degree in English literature and cultural studies with a specialization in film, video, and media. She worked at a public library for two years after her undergrad and enjoyed being able to experience many different aspects of public librarianship including running programs, helping customers with their information needs, and using 3D printing technology. Over the course of her master's degree, Alyssa is excited to explore the many different disciplines that information studies has to offer.
Metrics Literacies
Metrics Literacies
Developing online material to develop 'metrics literacies'—an integrated set of competencies, dispositions and knowledge that empowers individuals to recognize, interpret, critically assess and effectively and ethically use scholarly metrics.
Scholarly metrics, such as the h-index or impact factor, are widely applied in academic tenure and funding decisions, but often inappropriately. The quantification and oversimplification of research impact harms all scholarly disciplines by creating adverse effects, such as self-plagiarism, gratuitous self-citation and honorary authorship. This project aims to reduce the misuse of metrics and adverse effects by improving understanding and use of scholarly metrics across academia. Specifically, it seeks to support researchers and research administrators in developing metrics literacies—an integrated set of competencies, dispositions and knowledge that empowers individuals to recognize, interpret, critically assess and effectively and ethically use scholarly metrics.
The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of bibliometricians, science communicators, media producers, and education technology scholars. Leveraging subject expertise of research evaluators and technical expertise of film producers, Youtubers and podcasters, we will produce, test and disseminate multimedia resources that explain scholarly metrics in an efficient, effective and engaging manner. Based on Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia learning, the resources will combine auditory and visual elements to reduce the load for a single channel. The h-index, one of the most popular scholarly metrics, will be used as a case study.
Collaborators
Stefanie Haustein, Lauren Maggio, Alyssa Jeffrey, Robin Champieux, Carey Ming-Li Chen, Isabelle Dorsch, Elizabeth Gadd, Marie-Josée Archambault, Peter Musser, Alli Torban, Michelle Riedlinger, Germana Barata, Fiona Smith Hale
All research output of the Metrics Literacies project will be made available on Zenodo.