Product Overview: Scholarometer
Introduction
Scholarometer is a browser extension and web service designed for academic impact analysis, developed by Indiana University. It extends the functionality of Google Scholar to provide a comprehensive platform for evaluating the impact of academic publications and authors across various disciplines.
Key Features
Crowdsourced Annotations
Scholarometer leverages crowdsourcing to collect data about authors and their fields. Users can annotate authors with one or more field/discipline labels, which are then used to generate statistics and impact metrics. This approach allows for more flexible and interdisciplinary tagging, unlike traditional curated systems.
Impact Metrics
The tool computes universal citation impact metrics, such as the h s impact metric proposed by Kaur, Radicchi, and Menczer. These metrics can be compared across different fields, providing valuable insights into an author’s academic influence and the impact of their publications.
Integration with Google Scholar
Scholarometer integrates seamlessly with Google Scholar, appearing as a panel at the top right-hand side of any Google Scholar profile page. This integration allows users to access Scholarometer’s features directly from Google Scholar profiles.
Author and Discipline Networks
The platform generates networks of authors and disciplines based on the crowdsourced field annotations. This helps users identify relationships between authors and fields, facilitating interdisciplinary research and discovery of related work.
User Interface and Usability
Recent updates have improved the usability of the tool, including a popup that explains how to use Scholarometer before the first use, support for new CORS policies, and various bug fixes and performance improvements. The interface is designed to be easier to use, with features like faster information retrieval and improved h-index validation.
Customizable Tags
Users can choose from predefined subject categories, fields provided by other users, or enter their own custom tags. This flexibility is particularly beneficial for interdisciplinary research, allowing users to categorize authors and their work in multiple relevant fields.
API Access
Scholarometer provides an API for open, programmatic access to the data collected by the platform, including field annotations, impact measures, and networks of authors and fields. This API delivers data in JSON format for easy integration into other applications.
Functionality
Search and Annotation
Users can search for authors on Google Scholar and annotate them with relevant field tags. These annotations are used to calculate impact metrics and build discipline networks.
Impact Analysis
Scholarometer calculates and displays impact metrics such as the number of articles published, citations received, and the h s impact metric. This helps researchers and authors evaluate the influence of their work across different fields.
Interdisciplinary Search
The tool’s crowdsourced tagging system makes it more conducive to interdisciplinary search compared to traditional citation analysis tools. Users can find authors and their work categorized under multiple disciplines, which is particularly useful for emerging or interdisciplinary fields.
Conclusion
Scholarometer is a powerful tool for academic impact analysis, offering a unique blend of crowdsourced data collection, flexible tagging, and comprehensive impact metrics. By integrating with Google Scholar and providing a user-friendly interface, Scholarometer enhances the ability of researchers to evaluate and understand the impact of academic publications across diverse disciplines.