Measuring Academic Research Impact Based on Open Data: A Case of Engineering Faculties

Professors of Higher Educational Institutions focus their efforts primarily on teaching and on conducting research. While teaching encapsulates all the activities that transfer knowledge, research incorporates the participation in research projects, as well as the authoring of research publications. By measuring the efficiency in the various research activities, the overall academic research impact can be determined. Especially nowadays, that the open data related to research have been amplified in terms of volume, quality and diversity, it is imperative to create and support systems that host and present this kind of information. A variety of information can be derived by research open data, which have many different uses. The advertisement of the institutions' research outputs and the recommendation of research publications based on the already existing publications of the faculty are only some of the possible uses of this information. In this paper, we propose an information system that utilizes open data in order to bring to the fore the research influence of academia and guide the research policy makers. Furthermore, we present a case study with open data derived from engineering faculties to showcase the research impact of the selected faculties and the capabilities of the developed research information system, the e-Research system. The e-Research system consists of an interface for the presentation of the information related to research, which also incorporates a recommendation system to propose relevant research to academics that are registered in the system and search queries for retrieving significant information about the research impact.