SPEC Kit 346: Scholarly Output Assessment Activities  · 55
We are not very far along with this, but we have found that it is important to offer multiple opportunities for faculty to
learn more about it.
We’ve got to partner with others. Our roles and our libraries are changing dramatically, and we have many options for
the future. We can’t and won’t succeed by pursuing all possible directions. We need to make sure this is an area where
we can have impact, have the proverbial seat at the table. We can take on every new role proposed and be successful.
We need to be very strategic. That said, I do think this is an area that we should aggressively pursue. As a counter
example, I am less optimistic that scholars will want and accept help from librarians for data management, except at
the lowest level of doing the grunt work. Carefully document every metric and report you do. It can cause a firestorm.
Report all assessment data in its full context, what you searched, how you searched, limitations, what the metric is.
Know what you are doing or get out of the way. Higher-level metrics for departments, schools, and institutions can
be a huge time sink. Author disambiguation and tracking work histories is a huge task, esp. if you want the metric to
include all scholarship of your faculty from their first job. Again we need to partner and train others. Our engineering
school has a person devoted full-time to tracking metrics. We cannot possibly do citation metrics for the entire university
and keep it up to date. If we are not careful, we will spend our entire year sitting in front of a computer and retrieving
citation reports.
With workshops it really helps to have someone that is a tenure-track faculty, someone who knows and understands
what faculty have to provide for their department annual reports and/or their promotion & tenure portfolios. We
have had a LOT more visibility with our efforts since partnering with the provost’s office staff who handle faculty
development programs and also the VP for Research office. One of the struggles we have had in recent years is that
there are two different areas of need; one is the tenure-track faculty promotion/tenure needs, and the other is university
administrators who are compiling faculty comparison reports for accreditation or cross-institutional comparisons of
faculty scholarship and grant activities. The tools the university administrators tend to need something like University
Science Indicators (which has changed name now), Academic Analytics, or Plum Analytics. Faculty have more needs
along the lines of finding scholarly impact for disciplines that are less well covered by Scopus & Web of Science,
particularly in the humanities. We have needed to address each audience very differently in these discussions. I strongly
recommend forging relationships with university committees involved in reviewing faculty promotion & tenure files ...
educating them to what is “currently” available and ensuring they are involved in campus discussions about new trends
in these areas. Self-promotion, online visibility, and online involvement can impact altmetrics and readership statistics
and likely citation rates. It’s important to explain how using different tools (repositories, social media, etc.) can affect
the visibility and reach of research outputs. Not everyone likes social media, but it is important to be aware of it and to
be competent enough with these tools to be able to monitor what’s being said and done with your research. It should
not be assumed that only the “sciences” are interested in altmetrics. We had more attendees from the social sciences
and humanities at our workshop.
SCHOLARLY OUTPUT ASSESSMENT TRENDS
24. What future trends related to scholarly output assessment do you think pose implications for
research libraries? N=59
Administration could bypass the library by training their own people to pull the numbers from places like Web of
Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, SciVal, etc.
Adoption and use of alternative metrics for scholarly output assessment
Altmetrics and unique identifiers for researchers, e.g., ORCID ID
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