Research starts in human brain. Main objective of the research is to produce and share new fruitful knowledge to the society. Research process starts from informal context and gets completed in formal context. To understand, criticize, to mould and predict the end research product, it is necessary to capture the scholarly activities and scholarly communications before a particular research ends up in formal context and it is highly difficult to capture subjective knowledge which is informal. In 1944, Bernal stated that “Heart of Scholarly communication is visits, personal communication and letters” which clearly represents the invisible college where the scholarly communication is highly informal. Earlier, though we were aware of the significance of the informal scholarly communication, we neglected ii due to lack of technology. Hence a traditional notion was rooted deeply about scholarly contents that linked with the couple of words – ‘formal’ and ‘Stuctured’. Thus we started considering only the formal content which we were able to capture, for measuring the impact created by any articles. Informal Scholarly communication is not a new thing happening due to the development of technology, but the advancement in technologies have provided a better platform for the invisible college. Impact can be interpreted as being useful or that has changed the notion of a person about a particular concept. Impact created in the formal scholarly documents can be captured as citations and the impact created in the informal documents like invisible college can’t be tracked using the traditional bibliometrics. Intutively, formal communication is not the solely reliable criteria when measuring the impact created by any particular research.
Understanding citations
JIF and H index are the predominantly used metric s to measure the quality of the research output in spite of its limitations. In the past few decades, varying number of metrics like 5-Year Impact Factor, the Immediacy Index, the Eigen Factor, the Article Influence, and the SCImago Journal rank evolved to measure the quality of the research to overcome the limitations of one after the other yet these all metrics had citations as their base. Citations are the highest level of engagement with any research article. We cite a particular article for various reasons particularly to support the new article. A traditional notion among the scholarly community is that the citations and scholarly communications should be completely formal and structured as scholarly journals were the only means for scholarly communication while the scholarly journals are totally structured and formal. The advent of web 2.0 and digital media have actually changed the traditional scenario and it’s time for the traditional researchers to make a note of it. Research impact “describes the effects and outcomes, in terms of value and benefit,” as a result of research outputs but a research article having a high citation count is considered to have created high impact and is considered to be highly useful article. Citation is made to showcase the fact that the particular article was useful in supporting a new article but the research work or the research output can be used for many other purposes which can’t be cited. Garfield himself stated that “… there are undoubtedly highly useful journals that are not cited…”, which means that citations are not the only way to communicate the usefulness or impact created by any research.
Measuring the impact is not what we are able to capture and track; it’s about tracking what matters. Earlier, we were only able to track the impacts that were documented which are obviously the citations. By considering only the citations, we measure only half the impact created by the research article in the formal communication channels and we neglected the impact created in the informal communication channels due to lack of technology. Due to various factors such as the advancement in technology, the advent of web 2.0, the widespread usage of digital format, the communication channels have increased in breadth particularly the informal communication channels.
Citations were considered as the evidence or the only way of communicating among the research community that a particular research was useful. The usage of research is beyond the scholarly community to the target users of the society. Research is done to contribute something new and useful to the society and hence logically a research output should be considered as useful if it was really useful and created impact not only among the researchers community but also among the target users in the society (target users). For example, research findings of a applied clinical research will be used to support a new article or serve a base concept for it but it will also be widely used by practitioners in daily life who probably will not have time to write a review or publish a article to cite that particular article to communicate to the world about the usefulness and importance of that research. He may communicate his criticisms by any means of engagement with that article such as viewing, saving, downloading, discussing or commenting. The communication among the user community is mostly informal and unstructured. Earlier, scientific journals were the major means or channel to communicate the scholarly contents and citation counts served the purpose of capturing the impact of any research, but the arrival of the digital environment and web 2.0 have been a boon as it has provided a platform for easy and fast communication between the researcher and the target users where the target users have equal opportunity to be a part of scholarly communication. The digital and web 2.0 environments have widen the Scholarly communication channels, thus the researcher and the target users (society) communicate very easily and faster in no time. Scholarly communications are no longer limited to formal and structured format. Kuhn in 1977, stated “Spotting emerging research fronts will require tracking “formal and informal communication”. So, in this digital era, capturing citations from the scientific journals alone is not sufficient rather scholarly activities and scholarly comments are also needed to be captured. Scholarly communications in the invisible college also have to be tracked and various engagements with particular articles have to be considered to measure the impact of the particular article.
Citations were considered as the evidence or the only way of communicating among the research community that a particular research was useful. The usage of research is beyond the scholarly community to the target users of the society. Research is done to contribute something new and useful to the society and hence logically a research output should be considered as useful if it was really useful and created impact not only among the researchers community but also among the target users in the society (target users). For example, research findings of a applied clinical research will be used to support a new article or serve a base concept for it but it will also be widely used by practitioners in daily life who probably will not have time to write a review or publish a article to cite that particular article to communicate to the world about the usefulness and importance of that research. He may communicate his criticisms by any means of engagement with that article such as viewing, saving, downloading, discussing or commenting. The communication among the user community is mostly informal and unstructured. Earlier, scientific journals were the major means or channel to communicate the scholarly contents and citation counts served the purpose of capturing the impact of any research, but the arrival of the digital environment and web 2.0 have been a boon as it has provided a platform for easy and fast communication between the researcher and the target users where the target users have equal opportunity to be a part of scholarly communication. The digital and web 2.0 environments have widen the Scholarly communication channels, thus the researcher and the target users (society) communicate very easily and faster in no time. Scholarly communications are no longer limited to formal and structured format. Kuhn in 1977, stated “Spotting emerging research fronts will require tracking “formal and informal communication”. So, in this digital era, capturing citations from the scientific journals alone is not sufficient rather scholarly activities and scholarly comments are also needed to be captured. Scholarly communications in the invisible college also have to be tracked and various engagements with particular articles have to be considered to measure the impact of the particular article.
Bibliometrics mines the impact in formal and first scholarly web and the Altmetrics mines the impact in the informal invisible college
