Scholarly Communication is the means by which researchers and scholars produce, disseminate, assess, and discover academic research (American Library Association, 2006).
Online platforms have greatly expanded what scholarly work can be shared. Without the limitations of print journals, scholars can share more of their work and research process to a much wider audience, such as datasets, audio and video, multimedia presentations, working reports, and blogs. These non-article products may provide new opportunities for collaboration, assessing scholarly impact, and obtaining funding, especially for early career researchers. Researchers are increasingly sharing their work in a variety of forms and venues, including submitting clinical trial data to data repositories, publishing preprints to servers like medRxiv, and moderating public Q & A sessions on popular discussion sites like Twitter and Reddit.
Research Impact Metrics are tools and formulas that attempt to assess the quality, reach, or impact of a research product (Gasparan et al., 2018). Most commonly, the products of research are peer-reviewed journal articles. Article citation counts are the most common means of measuring an articles impact, but far from the only option (Cooper, 2015). Assessment metrics in scholarly communication can be broken down in two ways, by level of focus and by methodological approach. It is important to note that assessment metrics are increasingly driven by the institutional and professional pressures of "publish or perish". Competition for career advancement and funding opportunities necessitate some standardization in evaluation of scholars and scholarly work, but not all measures are created equal and, as with any tool, it is vital to know what is actually being measured. Upon better understanding these metrics we might find more accurate ways to judge scholarly quality and, in doing so, identify more impactful ways to communicate research.