New metric ‘leverages opinions of 8,000 experts’

Faculty Opinions has introduced a new metric in the research evaluation landscape, leveraging the opinions of more than 8,000 experts. 

The Faculty Opinions Score is designed to be an early indicator of an article’s future impact and a mark of research quality. The company describes the implications for researchers, academic institutions and funding bodies as ‘promising’.

Tiago Barros, managing director of Faculty Opinions, said: ‘The vision behind Faculty Opinions has always been to offer fairer and more transparent evaluation at article level and to shift an over-reliance on flawed citation metrics towards greater use of transparent expert opinion.

‘We are delighted to introduce the new Faculty Opinions Score which combines the predictive power of our Faculty’s expert recommendations with an article’s bibliometric performance.’

With more than 20 years’ worth of opinion, comprising more than 230k recommendations shared by the Faculty, the company’s analysis says the recommendations are a strong predictor of articles that will ultimately be highly cited and have significant impact.  

Data scientist Matias Rodriguez, who led the development of the Score said, ‘The Faculty Opinions Score assigns a numerical value to research publications in biology and medicine, aimed at quantifying their impact and quality compared to other publications in their field. 

‘The Faculty Opinions Score is derived by combining our unique star-rated recommendations on individual articles, made by world-leading experts, with bibliometrics to produce a radically new metric in the research evaluation landscape.’