A new metric for journal impact: Usage Factor

Peter Shepherd Director COUNTER Play (24min) Download: MP4 | MP3

The inadequacy of currently available citation-based bibliometrics tools for measuring the impact of research and researchers has been recognized for a number of years. The transformation of journals into online publications with a range of new features has created opportunities for new approaches to this and has led to the emergence some novel forms of impact measurement – altmetrics – that are both impressive and startling. This presentation describes a new, usage-based metric – the Usage Factor- for measuring the impact of research at the journal level, as well as its potential application as a measure of impact at the level of the individual article or scholar.