Alternative Indicators Summer School

On September 11-12 at Wolverhampton University, GB, a Summer School devoted to alternative indicators was held. The school was attended by Anastasia Kuznetsova, who analyzes the webometric and bibliometric indicators of Russian universities, and student of the BA "Sociology" Nikita Bazhenov. They share their impressions of the trip.

The school included two days. The atmosphere was comfortable and all sessions were held in a computer class for 20-30 people. We were the only Russians, there were many researchers from Germany, and some of them I knew from GESIS. One lecture was led by Kayvan Kousha Kayvan Kousha, all the other Mike Thelwall. We started with an explanation of what webometrics are, how to count and normalize them. The most interesting part for me wat to find the impact of the article depending on where the article is cited: educational or cultural impact and etc. How to compare the citation of articles in different fields and countries. On the second day of the school, they presented their program Webometric Analyst, which not only allows to download data but also extract and count the indicators for them. So, we downloaded articles from WoS in the field of chemistry in Spain and all over the world and were able to calculate that articles from Spain are more often cited on average in WoS than world ones. However, if we make a request for Wikipedia, then the situation is reversed.

I also gave a presentation of our work with Ilya Musabirov, Stanislav Pozdnyakov and Viktor Karepin on the analysis of the web presence of Russian universities and their online activity.Kayvan Kousha and was very surprised that I'm a Bachelor of Sociology and not Mathematics. We were generally the youngest because the school was designed for Masters and Ph.D. students. Thanks to university courses we even sometimes were more operative then others while doing practice.

Anastasiya Kuznetsova
4th-year student of BA "Sociology", participant of the Research Group

As a person who is not familiar with scientific conferences/summer schools and methods of holding them, I got an incredible experience and a lot of impressions. It was mostly the presentation of the Webometric Analyst program and an explanation of how it should be used. With all the slowness and old-fashion of the interface, it is a serious product for the collection and processing of data. It also has good documentation on the developer's site, which allows you to understand it by yourself. The scope of its use is not nearly limited, it looks like Data Miner, only with a built-in calculator inside. As a big fan of what code is code, but at some point, the code should acquire an interface and be accessible to ordinary users, I was very surprised. Since the program is "new" and not very well known in the wider circles, the study of Webometric Analyst within the framework of one of the courses on our BA "Sociology and Social Informatics" would help students both in their scientific projects, and gave them the opportunity to collect data from the Internet.

Nikita Bazhenov
4th-year student of BA "Sociology"