This was the title of a recent blog post on the BioMedCentral blog. The authors, talk about the history of academic publishing, the massive changes that have taken place in the industry, and what the future may hold.

What we found particularly interesting was the part of the blog post called “Measuring the impact of research, not journals and articles.”

Measuring the impact of research, not journals and articles
Diana Marshall, Senior Managing Editor

Here is the excerpt:

People like measuring things, establishing order, categorising and ranking. The Impact Factor is an established journal-level measure of citations. Every year journals, editors, authors and institutes prepare to receive new Impact Factors which might affect their journal strategy or where they publish.

There is debate about the value of Impact Factors and whether other measures better reflect the impact of a piece of research. Should factors such as public engagement, reproducibility or the impact on policies be considered when measuring the impact of a piece of research?

Article-level and alternative metrics such as Altmetrics are now available and widely used, as well as platforms like Impact Story and Plum Analytics, which allow authors and institutions to look at the impact of their research in a new way. In future, metrics will increasingly take into account more than simply citations but other measures such as how the data in an article is used and cited, reproducibility, applications of the work in places such as policies and software, and engagement or social media impact.

With increasing attention to the impact of the original article – and indeed the impact of the research itself rather than its published summary, could journal-level metrics in future be entirely redundant? Publishers have an important role in facilitating better metrics and enabling authors to look at metrics across all their outputs.

The author also asks this question:

Should factors such as public engagement, reproducibility or the impact on policies be considered when measuring the impact of a piece of research?

You can read the whole blog post here.