Research Metrics – the quantitative evaluation of research performance – is no doubt a hot topic nowadays. It concerns all actors in the research scene: researchers, institutions, funding agencies, publishers. Researchers use metrics to help understand the standing for their working, universities and research labs use metrics to understand progress towards strategic goals and to evaluate their members, external agencies use them for ranking funding applications and/or institutions, academic publishing industry measure the impact of published research at journal-level, article-level, and author-level. But how should research outcomes be evaluated? How can research impact be adequately measured? How to make comparisons across disciplines or take multidisciplinarity into account? These are just some of the questions that Scientometrics, making Science about Science, tries to address and for which appropriate answers are urgently needed.

In this first Workshop on Research Metrics of the University of Porto, we shall address issues such as the definition of adequate impact measures, the structure of co-authorship in different fields, topic modelling in bibliographic networks and expert profiling . The Workshop will consist on oral scientific contributions, roundtable discussions, and evaluation policies presentations, aiming at fostering debate on this important topic and ultimately contribute to better research performance evaluation.