Dr Jennifer Edmond

1
Metrics in a Small Country the Irish
Perspective
Dr Jennifer Edmond Executive Director and
Acting Trinity Long Room Hub
2
Presentation Roadmap

• Why Ireland might be different
• What do we want to measure?
• The Humanities ARE different
• Opening the black boxes
• Publications
• Citations
• Impact
• Peer review
• The dream of a self-regulating system
• Conclusion

3
Why Ireland might be different

• Small size - a virtue!
• Success of collborative ventures (IreL, SIF
  projects)
• Mechanism in place HSIS
• Other factors, eg encouragement to work with
  industry

4
What do we want to measure?

• This tends to be a slippery concept
• ranking countries, institutions, departments,
  disciplines, or individuals?
• measuring impact, excellence, productivity or
  some other form of contribution
• US example
• Input, output, throughput?

5
The Humanities ARE different

• Low funding needs?
• Similar publication habits?
• Understanding of knowledge?
• Slow to reach consensus
• Not Research, but criticism or scholarship?
• Celebration of the problem

6
Opening the black boxes

• Transparent and objective, or the opacity of
  externalisation?
• How many staff do you have, what is your name?
• Drilling down
• Publications
• Citations
• Impact factors (irony of the ERIH)
• Peer review

7
The dream of a self-regulating system

• The beauty of citations
• Scholarsource (ESF COST A32 DIorio/Barbera)
• Consensus as a condition of posssibility for
  scholarship
• Old and new communities of practice
• Graphs with labelled arcs

8
From the collections of Trinity College Library