UCount: community-based approach for measuring scientific reputation

ICST, in collaboration with EAI is offering its Society the opportunity to define a new way of measuring scientific reputation and effort for the research community. With the UCount approach, both participative/representative measures and bibliometric excellence are combined into a single ‘Reputation Metric’ that incorporates opinions from the community. The UCount approach has been developed to promote a clear, tangible indication of scientific contributions to society activities (i.e., Reputation) while at the same time recognising individual excellence and scientific impact through bibliographic measures (i.e., Metric).

As the Reputation Metric is monitored and calculated by the community it represents, it will ensure accuracy and offer members “accepted, transparent, recognition” of their efforts. In addition, we are conducting research aimed at understanding what the meaning of scientific reputation is and at understanding what are the factors contributing to it. If you want to contribute to this important research and can spare two minutes of your time, please go to http://icst.org/UCount-Survey and participate in the evaluation of the members of your community.

UCount is provided in collaboration with the LiquidPub project and powered by their Reseval technology. Communities and Researchers defining their Reputation Metric will be able to:

1) Use the novel approach for reverse engineering of scientific reputation in order to define Reputation Metric formula that matches the reputation as “perceived” by the Community in the best way.

2) Re-define Reputation Metric for their Community as it grows or its values change.

3) Include UCount metrics of researchers in their homepages and show on the ICST and EAI websites.

4) Define and calculate their own alternative to Community Reputation Metric, based on predefined, traditional, bibliographic measures such as h-index, g-index, etc.

5) In the future, define and control their bibliographic data used for the calculation of the Metric, based on the information gathered from sources such as Microsoft Academic Search, DBLP, Google Scholar, and others;

6) With the above Community or custom-defined Reputation Metric, define and compare research groups, such as departments, institutions, scientific communities, or arbitrary group of individuals.

7) In the future, go beyond citation-based metrics and beyond metrics that only consider the “paper” as the unit of scientific dissemination. Examples are reputation metrics that take into account how often a paper is shared with/recommended to colleagues, or metrics on datasets, experiments, or specific aspects of a paper. A promising approach aimed at developing such metrics is altmetrics.

Moreover, we are planning to use UCount in ICST Transactions, which are being launched in 2011. The idea is that after each review all authors of the reviewed paper will evaluate the reviewer on several criteria and such information will be used in the future to help editors to select better reviewers.

The UCount approach is now being presented to the Research Community for feedback and discussion in so that it truly can be considered a metric developed by researchers, for researchers and for the benefit of the scientific community it represents and those that interact with it, focusing on science advancement, rather than number advancement. Please visit UCount blog at http://ucountblog.wordpress.com/.

An organisational Committee is in place to help define and coordinate the process of collecting and aggregating input from the society and ensure that the ICST’s Reputation Metric defined with UCount approach becomes a meaningful, reliable measure of scientific standing, which is defined by its members and accepted by the research Society.

To be a part of this opportunity and provide Your input, to ensure that You get a chance to Count and define Your own metric and that Your effort Counts in the Society, evaluate your community at http://icst.org/UCount-Survey and make sure that UCount.