• A benchmark for impact assessment of affordable housing

      Chinyio, Ezekiel A.; Okehielem, Nelson (University of Wolverhampton, 2011)
      There is a growing recognition in the built environment for the significance of benchmarking. It is recognized as a key driver for measuring success criteria in the built environment sector. In spite of the huge application of this technique to the sector and other sectors, very little is known of it in affordable housing sub-sector and where it has been used, components of housing quality were not holistically considered. This study considers this identified deficiency in developing a benchmark for assessing affordable housing quality impact factors. As part of this study, samples of 4 affordable Housing projects were examined. Two each were originally selected from under 5 categories of ‘operational quality standards’ within United Kingdom. Samples of 10 projects were extracted from a total of 80 identified UK affordable housing projects. Investigative study was conducted on these projects showing varying impact factors and constituent parameters responsible for their quality. Identified impact criteria found on these projects were mapped against a unifying set standard and weighted with ‘relative importance index’. Adopting quality function deployment (QFD) technique, a quality matrix was developed from these quality standards groupings with their impact factors. An affordable housing quality benchmark and a relative toolkit evolved from resultant quality matrix of project case studies and questionnaire served on practitioners’ performance. Whereas the toolkit was empirically tested for reliability and construct validity, the benchmark was subjected to refinement with the use of project case study.
    • Google Books, Scopus, Microsoft Academic and Mendeley for impact assessment of doctoral dissertations: A multidisciplinary analysis of the UK

      Kousha, Kayvan; Thelwall, Mike (MIT Press, 2020-06-25)
      A research doctorate normally culminates in publishing a dissertation reporting a substantial body of novel work. In the absence of a suitable citation index, this article explores the relative merits of alternative methods for the large-scale assessment of dissertation impact, using 150,740 UK doctoral dissertations from 2009-2018. Systematic methods for this were designed for Google Books, Scopus, Microsoft Academic, and Mendeley. Less than 1 in 8 UK doctoral dissertations had at least one Scopus (12%), Microsoft Academic (11%) or Google Books citation (9%), or at least one Mendeley reader (5%). These percentages varied substantially by subject area and publication year. Google Books citations were more common in the Arts and Humanities (18%), whereas Scopus and Microsoft Academic citations were more numerous in Engineering (24%). In the Social Sciences, Google Books (13%) and Scopus (12%) citations were important and in Medical Sciences, Scopus and Microsoft Academic citations to dissertations were rare (6%). Few dissertations had Mendeley readers (from 3% in Science to 8% in the Social Sciences) and further analysis suggests that Google Scholar finds more citations but does not report information about all dissertations within a repository and is not a practical tool for large-scale impact assessment.
    • A systematic method for identifying references to academic research in grey literature

      Bickley, Matthew; Kousha, Kayvan; Thelwall, Mike (Springer, 2022-06-23)
      Grey literature encompasses documents not published in academic journals or books. Some grey literature has substantial societal importance, such as medical guidelines, government analyses and pressure group reports. Academic research cited in such documents may therefore have had indirect societal impact, such as in policy making, clinical practice or legislation. Identifying citations to academic research from grey literature may therefore help assess its societal impacts. This is difficult, however, due to the variety of document and referencing formats used in grey literature, even from a single organisation. In response, this study introduces and tests a semi-automatic method to match academic journal articles with unstandardised grey literature cited references. For this, the metadata (lead author last name, title, year) of 2.45 million UK Russell Group university outputs was matched against a 100-document sample of UK government grey literature to assess the accuracy of 21 matching heuristics. The optimal method (lead author last name and title in either order, maximum of 200 characters apart) is sufficiently accurate and scalable to make the task of matching research outputs to grey literature references feasible. The method was then applied to 3347 government publications, showing approximately 23% of UK government grey literature in this study contained at least one reference to UK Russell Group university output, and of this grey literature, an average of 3.79 references were present per document. The applied method also shows that economics and environmental science academic research is most cited between 2010 and 2018.