Snowball Metrics is, crucially, a bottom-up initiative. It is owned by research-intensive universities around the globe, to ensure that its outputs are of practical use to them, and are not imposed by organizations with potentially distinct aims such as funders, agencies, or suppliers of research information.

The universities aim to agree on methodologies that are robustly and clearly defined, so that the metrics they describe enable the confident comparison of apples with apples. These metrics are data source- and system-agnostic, meaning that they are not tied to any particular provider of data or tools. The resulting benchmarks between research-intensive universities provide reliable information to help understand research strengths, and thus to establish and monitor institutional strategies.

The aspiration is for these metrics to become global standards that enable institutional benchmarking, and to cover the entire spectrum of research activities.

The agreed and tested methodologies are available free-of-charge to be used by any organization:

The complete HESA-HERD discipline denominator mapping is available here.

Snowball Metrics cards for all recipes from the third recipe book can be downloaded here.

The Snowball Metrics website is owned and operated by Elsevier.