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Exploring alternative metrics of scholarly performance in the social sciences and humanities in Taiwan

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Abstract

Research output and impact metrics derived from commercial citation databases such as Web of Science and Scopus have become the de facto indicators of scholarly performance across different disciplines and regions. However, it has been pointed out that the existing metrics are largely inadequate to reflect scholars’ overall peer-mediated performance, especially in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) where publication channels are more diverse. In this paper alternative metrics exploring a variety of formal and informal communication channels were proposed, with the aim of better reflecting SSH scholarship. Data for a group of SSH scholars in Taiwan on these metrics were collected. Principal component analysis revealed four underlying dimensions represented by the 18 metrics. Multiple-regression analyses were then performed to examine how well each of these dimensions predicted the academic standing of the scholars, measured by the number of public grants awarded and prestigious research awards received. Differences in the significance of the predictors were found between the social sciences and humanities. The results suggest the need to consider disciplinary differences when evaluating scholarly performance.

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Acknowledgments

The study was sponsored by “The Aim for the Top University Project, Integrated Platform of Digital Humanities” at National Taiwan University in Taiwan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Library and Information Science, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, 10617, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C

    Kuang-hua Chen, Muh-chyun Tang & Chun-mei Wang

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jieh Hsiang

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  1. Kuang-hua Chen
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  2. Muh-chyun Tang
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  3. Chun-mei Wang
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  4. Jieh Hsiang
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Correspondence to Muh-chyun Tang.

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Chen, Kh., Tang, Mc., Wang, Cm. et al. Exploring alternative metrics of scholarly performance in the social sciences and humanities in Taiwan. Scientometrics 102, 97–112 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1420-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1420-6

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