The Metrics Project highlights anthropological publications that attract the broader public’s attention – especially in news outlets and policy documents from around the world.
Anthropologists often address their publications to small coteries of colleagues. Reinforcing this tendency, they frequently assess a publication’s value by the number of times colleagues cite it. Such assessments suggest anthropology is primarily meant for anthropologists. They convey an intellectual insularity.
Agencies and foundations outside academia, however, fund most anthropological research. (Anthropologists rarely fund their own work.) A key criterion of these funders is that the research they fund have value for the broader public, not just for a few select academics. The National Science Foundation (NSF), for example, requires all proposals and final reports to specify the “broader impacts” of their research defined as encompassing “the potential of the proposed activity to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes” and written “insofar as possible, [to] be understandable to a scientifically . . . literate lay reader” (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_2.jsp#IIC2d). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research affirms “realizing the full potential of our Nation’s investment in health research requires that science inform both practice and policy . . . we can stimulate relevant and usable research that is informed by the needs of end users whether they are healthy individuals, patients, practitioners, community leaders, or policymakers” (https://obssr.od.nih.gov/sites/obssr/files/OBSSR_Prospectus_2007.pdf, p.17). Paralleling these perspectives, the United Kingdom’s Research Councils (RCUK) stresses a “public engagement should be a part of every skilled researcher’s portfolio” (https://www.ukri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/UKRI-16102020-Benefits-of-public-engagement.pdf).
The fact that anthropologists frequently write for a small coterie of colleagues does not mean their research is not relevant to the broader public. It can be. But there are few metrics to measure and reward those whose publications are noted by people outside the academy. The main metrics, such as Google Scholar, highlight the attention paid by academics to other academics’ publications.
Three Audiences: Funding Agencies, University Administrators, and Faculty
As this project emphasizes, altmetrics – short for alternative metrics – can be used to highlight the public value of anthropological publications. By clicking on the red rectangle to the left of a listed publication in the Metrics Project, readers can see which news outlets make reference to that publication.
Given funding agencies’ concern with public outreach, having an applicant’s research cited in public news outlets or policy documents offers an advantage in the grant review process. A recent commentary in Nature observes: “In the digital age, a growing number of researchers and publishers are using more than just [academic] citation counts to track the impact of their publications. In an essay in PLoS Biology, three authors from a major UK research-funding agency argue that alternative metrics — or altmetrics, such as social-media mentions — can help funders to measure the full reach of the research that they support” (http://www.nature.com/news/funders-drawn-to-alternative-metrics-1.16524).
While university administrators rarely structure promotion and tenure solely around a scholar’s outreach, it is clear that administrators value the public recognition of their faculty. By providing a clear measurable standard for public recognition, the Metrics Project can enhance an institution’s status with the funders, alumni, and politicians who support it.
On a personal level, The Evolution of Impact Indicators suggests, “the potential uses of altmetrics for academics fall into three main categories: for monitoring and tracking early attention [to their publication vs. the much delayed citations in academic journals], for showcasing engagement, and for discovery purposes . . . at present, authors rely on download stats, citation data (which takes a long time to accrue), and direct feedback from the academic community to gauge how their work has been received. With altmetrics, those same authors can start to see not only how academics but also how the wider public are responding to their work as soon as it is published” (http://docs.scholastica.s3.amazonaws.com/altmetrics/evolution-of-impact-indicators.pdf?utm_campaign=Altmetrics%20eBook&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8w9nNGk9o9N3O2lg_56UC_cbu8a_WjV5aULt1ZcQvrpZQ1kufEOd3QhXVtdmcrNjKzVrMCFsorep9bObROOEx9-AfmABNaicZn00J5xn3nUOaYWc0&_hsmi=292835068&utm_content=292835068&utm_source=hs_automation , pages 23-4).
Attention Versus Impact
A common frame of reference for assessing a publication’s value involves the publication’s “impact factor” – a standard suggested by the American linguist Garfield in 1955 (note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor). According to Webster’s Dictionary, impact, as a noun, refers to “the force of impression of one thing on another.” While some anthropological publications may arouse and hold attention they rarely have ”a significant or major effect” on the broader society (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impact#). That is to say, they rarely have public impact.
In respect to anthropology, Borofsky (2019) noted that anthropologists rarely engage with the work of prominent colleagues – such as Lévi-Strauss, Geertz, and Wolf – except in passing. He found that most anthropological citations to these figures did not include extensive discussions. The citations mostly referred to the figures for no more than two sentences in their publications. Using academic citation scores to assess impact, in other words, conveys a false impression. It overstates the actual attention a publication receives. The Metrics Project seeks to address this problem in the public arena by looking at not only who in the world press takes note of anthropological publications but what they actually say about them. Take a look.
References:
Borofsky, Robert. An Anthropology of Anthropology: Is It Time to Shift Paradigms? 2019. Kailua, HI: Center for a Public Anthropology (https://books.publicanthropology.org/an-anthropology-of-anthropology.html).
All links noted in this paper were accessed and available on Oct 8, 2024.