Snowball Metrics Landscape
This is a matrix of all research activities that Snowball Metrics aim to cover. It was agreed by the project partners. The landscape lends itself to the challenge of deriving meaningful information in social sciences and arts and humanities, as well as the more familiar approaches in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (“STEM”) disciplines.
A set of “denominators” was also defined to:
- Fractionalize (“slice and dice”) Snowball Metrics so that they can be read out at various levels of detail
- Normalize Snowball Metrics across institutions to enable comparison between units of different sizes
“Snowball Metrics is about working on and sharing a common language so that institutions are confident that they can use all of their data to compare their performance with each other in an apples-to-apples way. It’s not trying to tell anyone which of these metrics to use to answer any particular question: which sub-set of the metrics you use, whether 1-5, or 2, 9, and 13, is up to the universities and funders. It’s just like using a recipe book to cook your dinner: I don’t need to cook the entire book to find it useful; instead I choose what I like, and perhaps what I have the ingredients in the fridge for.”