Identifying audiences of e-infrastructures--tools for measuring impact.

Research evaluation should take into account the intended scholarly and non-scholarly audiences of the research output. This holds too for research infrastructures, which often aim at serving a large variety of audiences. With research and research infrastructures moving to the web, new possibilitie...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Daphne Duin, David King, Peter van den Besselaar
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2012-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/23239995/pdf/?tool=EBI
Description
Summary:Research evaluation should take into account the intended scholarly and non-scholarly audiences of the research output. This holds too for research infrastructures, which often aim at serving a large variety of audiences. With research and research infrastructures moving to the web, new possibilities are emerging for evaluation metrics. This paper proposes a feasible indicator for measuring the scope of audiences who use web-based e-infrastructures, as well as the frequency of use. In order to apply this indicator, a method is needed for classifying visitors to e-infrastructures into relevant user categories. The paper proposes such a method, based on an inductive logic program and a bayesian classifier. The method is tested, showing that the visitors are efficiently classified with 90% accuracy into the selected categories. Consequently, the method can be used to evaluate the use of the e-infrastructure within and outside academia.
ISSN:1932-6203