A KMi research student Drahomira Herrmannova (Dasha) has successfully defended her PhD thesis titled: "Mining Scholarly Publications for Research Evaluation." While current research metrics evaluate the excellence of a publication based on the number of interactions in the scholarly network, such as the number of times it has been cited (Bibliometrics) or downloaded (Altmerics), this thesis explores the use of publications’ full texts in research evaluation. The thesis first investigates what research quality is and then defines a new class of research evalution metrics called Semantometrics and its first metric called contribution. It then demonstrates, on a newly created True Impact Dataset, that the contribution metric can be more effective in identifying key research than existing research evaluation metrics. 

Dasha’s examiners were Prof Enrico Motta and Dr Iana Atanassova of University of Franche-Comté. Dasha’s supervisors were Dr Petr Knoth and Prof Zdenek Zdrahal. Dasha will continue her research in this area at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States. All the best Dasha!