Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 70.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 07:06:30 +0100
From: "Leo Robert Klein" <leo@leoklein.com>
Subject: RE: THES article on research access Friday June 6 2003
On Sat, 07 Jun 2003, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> One natural way to measure research impact would be to adopt the
> approach of the web search engine Google. Google measures the importance
> of a website. It does this by rank-ordering search results according to
> how many other websites link to them: the more links, the higher the
> rank. This works amazingly well, but it is far too crude for measuring
> research impact, which is about how much a paper is being used by other
> researchers. There is, however, a cousin of web links that researchers
> have been using for decades as a measure of impact: citations.
Funny, I've often wondered why database vendors don't look into this. I
mean, with all the interest in improving search results in subscription
databases, you'd think this would be a promising way to go. Operations like
ISI seem pre-built for such an approach. Other vendors with growing
collections of full-text material could do the same.
LEO
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Leo Robert Klein
http://leoklein.com
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