Grant Lewison
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Dr Grant Lewison |
Dr Grant Lewison was originally trained as a mechanical engineer and experimental hydrodynamicist at the University of Cambridge, and then spent two years at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the Civil Service as a scientist. He worked on ship motions research for many years before switching to science policy in 1981. At the Department of Trade and Industry, he was responsible for policy for assisting small firms with technological development, civil use of military and nuclear technology, and the Research Associations. He worked for four years in the European Commission in Brussels, advising on research evaluation and began his studies in bibliometrics. On his return to the UK he worked for two years for a small consultancy firm, and carried out evaluations, particularly of international fellowship and scholarship schemes, and some bibliometric studies.
In 1993 he joined the Wellcome Trust to design and manage the Research Outputs Database (ROD). Since then he has carried out many consultancy assignments in bibliometrics and written about 70 papers. At the end of 2000, the ROD was transferred to The City University on contract from the Trust, and he moved with it on secondment as visiting Professor in the Information Science department. The ROD project ended in 2003, and Dr Lewison left The City University at the end of 2005 to set up his own consultancy company in Richmond, Evaluametrics Ltd, which undertakes research evaluation through publication metrics. Recently he has also been appointed as a Senior Research Fellow at University College London. He is on the editorial boards of the journals Research Evaluation and Scientometrics.
His current activities are mostly focussed on biomedical research outputs and their evaluation by means of multiple indicators, including citation in the mass media, on clinical guidelines and on government policy documents. Much of this work involves the initial delineation of a field of research in consultation with an expert in the subject so that any indicators of research impact are appropriately normalised. Subject-based “filters” are usually based on lists of specialist journals and of title words, occasionally supplemented with address terms, and can achieve high precision and recall. His work has also been extensively based on the analysis of the financial acknowledgements on papers, which turn out to have a major influence on the quality of the work.
