Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Evid Based Ment Health. 2017 May;20(2):33-34. doi: 10.1136/eb-2017-102668. Epub 2017 Apr 6.
An increasing number of metrics are used to measure the impact of research papers. Despite being the most commonly used, the 2-year impact factor is limited by a lack of generalisability and comparability, in part due to substantial variation within and between fields. Similar limitations apply to metrics such as citations per paper. New approaches compare a paper's citation count to others in the research area, while others measure social and traditional media impact. However, none of these measures take into account an individual author's contribution to the paper or the number of authors, which we argue are key limitations. The UK's 2014 Research Exercise Framework included a detailed bibliometric analysis comparing 15 selected metrics to a 'gold standard' evaluation of almost 150 000 papers by expert panels. We outline the main correlations between the most highly regarded papers by the expert panel in the Psychiatry, Clinical Psychology and Neurology unit and these metrics, most of which were weak to moderate. The strongest correlation was with the SCImago Journal Rank, a variant of the journal impact factor, while the amount of Twitter activity showed no correlation. We suggest that an aggregate measure combining journal metrics, field-standardised citation data and alternative metrics, including weighting or colour-coding of individual papers to account for author contribution, could provide more clarity.
越来越多的指标被用于衡量研究论文的影响力。尽管影响因子（2 年）是最常用的指标之一，但它受到缺乏通用性和可比性的限制，部分原因是不同领域内和领域之间存在很大差异。类似的局限性也适用于引文数等指标。新方法将一篇论文的引文数与该研究领域的其他论文进行比较，而其他方法则衡量社会和传统媒体的影响力。然而，这些指标都没有考虑到作者对论文的贡献或作者人数，我们认为这是关键的局限性。英国 2014 年的研究评估框架包括一项详细的文献计量分析，该分析将 15 种选定的指标与专家小组对近 15 万篇论文的“黄金标准”评估进行了比较。我们概述了精神病学、临床心理学和神经病学单元中专家小组评估的最受关注论文与这些指标之间的主要相关性，其中大多数相关性较弱到中等。最强的相关性是与 SCImago 期刊排名（期刊影响因子的一种变体），而推文活动的数量则没有相关性。我们建议，可以采用一种综合指标，结合期刊指标、领域标准化引文数据和替代指标，包括对作者贡献进行加权或颜色编码，以提供更清晰的认识。
