Citation measures for supporting scholarly impact in Community Informatics research

Abstract

The global political environment place research institutions under increasing pressure to provide quantitative evidence of the scholarly impact of the research. Measuring impact in Community Informatics research in terms of traditional citation based metrics is particularly problematic due to the interdisciplinary nature of the field and the lack of coverage and indexing of the relevant journals by major commercial citation enhanced databases like Scopus and Web of Science. Furthermore, the citation based measures have many known limitations and therefore this paper argues for the investigation of altmetrics as an additional research impact measure in Community Informatics. This paper reports on a bibliometric and altmetric analysis conducted on The Journal of Community Informatics (JOCI). The bibliometric study investigated article production, collaboration and authorship patterns. The study also looked into JOCI article level metrics by comparing traditional citation metrics (Google Scholar citations), usage metrics (abstract and article views) and alternative metrics (Mendeley readership). The contribution is to provide more insight into the factors that could influence the citation impact in Community Informatics research.