Abstract

The extensive use of the web by many sectors of society has created the potential for new wider impact indicators. This article reviews research about Google Scholar and Google Patents, both of which can be used as sources of impact indicators for academic articles. It also briefly reviews methods to extract types of links and citations from the web as a whole, although the indicators that these generate are now probably too broad and too dominated by automatically generated websites, such as library and publisher catalogues, to be useful in practice. More valuable web-based indicators can be derived from specific types of web pages that cite academic research, such as online presentations, course syllabi, and science blogs. These provide evidence that is easier to understand and use and less likely to be affected by unwanted types of automatically generated content, although they are susceptible to gaming.

Abstract

This literature review assesses indicators derived from social media sources, including both general and academic sites. Such indicators have been termed altmetrics, influmetrics, social media metrics, or a type of webometric, and have recently been commercialised by a number of companies and employed by some publishers and university administrators. The social media metrics analysed here derive mainly from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, F1000, Mendeley, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. They have the apparent potential to deliver fast, free indicators of the wider societal impact of research, or of different types of academic impacts, complementing academic impact indicators from traditional citation indexes. Although it is unwise to employ them in formal evaluations with stakeholders, due to their susceptibility to gaming and lack of real evidence that they reflect wider research impacts, they are useful for formative evaluations and to investigate science itself. Mendeley reader counts are particularly promising.

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies, technologies that produce three-dimensional parts layer by layer from a material, have the potential to revolutionize the paradigm of manufacturing. Furthermore, in recent years AM technologies have sparked intense interest for developing medical implants, devices and scaffolds. In this context, the main objective of this article is to present an overall view of the trends and the impact of the research carried out in AM technologies for biomedical engineering applications. Therefore, to achieve the main objective, a research trend and scientific impact analysis model has been designed and implemented, which carries out a bibliometric indicator analysis, in general, and a web indicator analysis, in particular. The findings obtained will advance the means of visualizing the state of research in AM for biomedical engineering technologies.