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How To Read 200,000 Publications: Vivo And The Intelligent Evaluation Of Scholarship, John Mark Ockerbloom, Anne Seymour

John Mark Ockerbloom

VIVO and the data that it manages enable a variety of new mechanisms for analyzing and evaluating the scholarship of individuals and organizations. These mechanisms provide both opportunities and dangers.

As critics of overuse of impact factors, magazine rankings, and student survey scores know, it can be tempting to rely on short-cuts. Aggregation and automated analysis of readily available data, used wisely, can reveal important information that can help assess and improve scholarly impact. Used unwisely, however, it can replace the thoughtful assessment of scholarly quality with quick comparisons of mechanically-generated scores that may have little to do with the …