SPEC Kit 346: Scholarly Output Assessment Activities  · 57
Decrease in institutional budgets. Increase in cost of tools. Increase in automated harvesting of information. Increase in
competition for resources and prestige. Increase in institutional silos.
Develop new tools & data sources for non-journal materials. Services and workshops are focused on promotion and
tenure efforts.
Develop support to academics editing a peer review journal. Continue developing a local assessment team on the
bibliometric impact of university research. Work on a unique researcher ID (e.g., ORCID type) or signature.
Different groups of scholars (e.g., digital humanists, open access advocates) decry creeping neoliberalism in academia
and advocate for thinking about P&T decisions in new ways. Research libraries need to be cognizant of how SOA feeds
into these other issues (and how these issues feed into SOA).
Everyone at the university is much more interested in measuring scholarly output, both for individual scholars and for
the overall ranking of the university, and libraries will be recognized as being expert about metrics, citation analysis, etc.
As interest grows, library faculty and staff will take on, and want to take on, new roles in this area. Since institutional
repositories, open access mandates, and library publishing are implicated, all areas in which we are working, scholarly
output assessment will be part of our work. We will collaborate more with publishers, we will need more resources in
terms of staffing and sources, and we will recruit for and reassign to new positions.
Expanding the portfolio of liaisons to include these new services. We need to educate subject librarians, who have
the most direct contact with students and faculty within the institution, about scholarly output assessment and
associated tools.
Explosion of tools on market that are challenging to keep up with and support. These also have budget implications, i.e.,
library cannot purchase all. Rather, promote resources library has available and free tools. Another trend is use of these
tools across disciplines, including to those not familiar with concepts, or where they are perceived not to be useful/
accurate.
From a faculty services perspective, the evolving role of output assessment in tenure and promotion will mean
that librarians acquire more knowledge and skills in bibliometrics and scientometrics. From an information literacy
perspective, the shift from pre- to post-publication review and assessment will change how librarians teach students to
assess sources.
Funding for expensive platforms such as Digital Measures. Proliferation of free services that do different things.
I think major library vendors and publishers will begin to offer this service as a package with other services.
I think the increasing importance of alternative metrics will continue to raise implications. For example, many tools that
measure alternative metrics rely on information from the author in order to be accurate, which means that it would be
difficult, if not impossible, to have a comprehensive tool assessing scholarly output that is implemented without active
author involvement.
I think there are more opportunities for libraries in this area because this is using databases (Scopus, WOS) and journal
information (which feeds Google Scholar) to connect with faculty profile tools that have many purposes from running
metrics at individual, department, and campus levels in additional to many other purposes. If libraries are not involved
in these implementations on their campus, they are losing out on an important opportunity to remain relevant to their
users and to build further collaborations.
Increase in the emphasis that faculty members and researchers demonstrate success in collaborations as well as by
the impact of their research means that the tools and the skills to do this are becoming increasingly important. This
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