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Scholarship Impact Metrics

Introduction to scholarship impact metrics and the ways to increase the overall impact.

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Maximize Impact

There are three key factors that can help in increasing the research impact:

  • VISIBILITY - increased visibility means larger audience  
    • write to be found: write effective titles and abstracts, assign keywords, tags, and subjects, use synonyms, use SVG images (so there could be indexed and retrieved)
    • consider publishing negative or inconclusive results 
    • enhance your publications with supplemental materials (tables, datasets, filesets, presentations, video and audio files, etc)
    • retain copyright - this will allow you to maximize your options for dissemination
    • choose open access publishing (open access, fee-based open access, or delayed open access journals)
    • use social media to disseminate information on your papers and research 
    • develop your academic profile so it will include all your academic and social media scholarly activity  (post manuscripts of publications, conference abstracts, and supplemental materials such as images, illustrations, slides, specimens, blogs, podcasts,etc.) and the extent of your academic network.
  • CONSISTENCY - ensure that all your works are collected under your name
    • create your unique ID - eliminate author ambiguity by creating unique identifiers for each scholar
    • claim wrong citations to your papers
    • use same author name variation
    • use standardized institutional affiliation 
    • create and keep public profiles up-to-date
  • AVAILABILITY - ensure permanent and stable access to your work
    • have a data management plan
    • get permanent identifiers for your work (DOI, ARK, EZID)
    • post your publications to open access repositories 

Tools for maximizing impact

  • VISIBILITY
    • Retain copyright
      Negotiate with publishers before signing publisher agreements
      Use Case Author Addendum to secure your non-exclusive rights.
    • Enhance your publications with supplemental materials
      Supplemental material with your article makes it more discoverable
      Supplemental materials can be cited independently, increasing the impact of your work
      Ensures you meet your funder's requirements.
    • Select Publishers with Open-Access or Delayed Open Access Journals
      To check publishers' open access policies use Sherpa/RoMEO website. Many publishers offer a hybrid open access publishing model, where the authors retain the copyright and the publishers are granted publishing and distribution rights. This model requires a publication fee from the authors. For publication fees, check the list developed by University of California Berkeley. Other publishers offer open access after a embargo period. See HighWire Press's list of embargo from a variety of publishers or Elsevier's list of journals with open access embargo.
    • Establish professional profile
      • mantain university profile website
      • ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) - allows you as a researcher to reliably and unambiguously connect your name with your work throughout your career
      • PIVOT @Case
      • Google Scholar Author Profile 
      • LinkedIn
      • Academia.edu - Site for scientists "to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow."
      • ResearchGate - Social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators
  • CONSISTENCY

     

  • AVAILABILITY

    • Permanent Identifiers
      • EZID - Create & manage unique, long-term identifiers
      • DOI - Technical and social infrastructure for the registration and use of persistent interoperable identifiers for use on digital networks
      • ARK - URLs designed to support long-term access to information objects

    • Other Repositories 
      • Dryad - Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable.
      • re3data.org - registry of research data repositories
      • Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) - Dedicated archive for storing and sharing digital data generated or collected through qualitative and multi-method research in the social sciences
      • Simmons University Open Access Directory - List of repositories for open data compiled by Simmons University
      • GitHub  Repository for open access software codes

    • Cross Repositories Search Engines 
      • OpenDOAR - Uses Google’s Custom Search Engine to search across the repositories listed in the OpenDOAR directory of repositories.
      • ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories ) - Developed the University of Southampton, UK. 
      • OAIster - Developed by the library at the University of Michigan and adopted by OCLC.
      • BASE - One of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
      • Digital Commons Network - Brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.