Genesis of Altmetrics or Article-level Metrics for Measuring Efficacy of Scholarly Communications: Current Perspectives

The article-level metrics (ALMs) or altmetrics becomes a new trendsetter in recent times for measuring the impact of scientific publications and their social outreach to intended audiences. The popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin and social bookmarks such as Mendeley and CiteULike are nowadays widely used for communicating research to larger transnational audiences. In 2012, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment got signed by the scientific and researchers communities across the world. This declaration has given preference to the ALM or altmetrics over traditional but faulty journal impact factor (JIF)-based assessment of career scientists. JIF does not consider impact or influence beyond citations count as this count reflected only through Thomson Reuters' Web of Science database. Furthermore, JIF provides indicator related to the journal, but not related to a published paper. Thus, altmetrics now becomes an alternative metrics for performance assessment of individual scientists and their contributed scholarly publications. This paper provides a glimpse of genesis of altmetrics in measuring efficacy of scholarly communications and highlights available altmetric tools and social platforms linking altmetric tools, which are widely used in deriving altmetric scores of scholarly publications. The paper thus argues for institutions and policy makers to pay more attention to altmetrics based indicators for evaluation purpose but cautions that proper safeguards and validations are needed before their adoption

Three Essays in Health Care

This dissertation examines two common sources of increased health care costs – readmissions and the co-occurrence of depression among patients with diabetes. The first paper examines hospital performance in the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program to determine whether sources of incentive heterogeneity are associated with differences in improvements over multiple years. I find that hospitals seem to be responding to the main incentive in the program, as those that performed poorly in previous years improve significantly more than hospitals that have avoided penalties. Hospitals also are making improvements in conditions that have the highest marginal benefit from better performance. Payer mix does not seem to be correlated with hospital performance over time even though the financial incentives of the program only apply to future Medicare reimbursements. In the second paper I develop a model to predict the onset of depression among individuals with diabetes. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, I find that gender, body-mass index, hypertension, history of stroke, history of heart disease, and duration of diabetes are significant predictors of annual depression status. I then build this depression prediction algorithm into the Michigan Model for Diabetes, an existing microsimulation model that allows users to evaluate the progression of diabetes. In the final paper, I use the modified diabetes simulation model to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the collaborative care intervention to treat depression among patients with diabetes. Trials suggest that the collaborative care intervention, a multidisciplinary approach to address the depressive symptoms of patients, can be cost-effective in the short-term when used to treat patients with diabetes and comorbid depression. Using simulation models allows us to evaluate the long-term cost-effectiveness as well as the influence of a variety of inputs on the value of the program. Only when the utility loss associated with depression is small or the intervention effectiveness is substantially decreased does the intervention require a higher willingness-to-pay to be considered cost-effective. Otherwise, our base-case analysis and other one-way sensitivity analyses support the conclusion that this intervention is cost-effective.PHDHealth Service Org & Plcy PhDUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144000/1/anupdas_1.pd

Open Access to Scientific Knowledge: Policy Perspectives and National Initiatives

Various initiatives are taken globally to make knowledge repositories more accessible to researchers by exploiting the internet platform and developing a model that allows free access. India is also actively participating in this new initiative. Open access to scientific knowledge is an integral part of India’s S&T policy intervention. Some of the major international and Indian national initiatives are highlighted. Further efforts that would be required to make Indian participation more fruitful are also brought out