Research Metrics

Under the guidance of the Bibliometrics and Research Impact Librarian (BRIL), I have been working on a series of ongoing projects related to institutional and faculty research impact and bibliometrics. Part of my job is to support the BRIL in developing researcher-level productivity and benchmark reports using a customized, web-based research evaluation tool, and Microsoft Excel. While the reports aggregate the publication and citation data of the researchers from my co-op placement institution, my work focuses on the verification of author names, data deduplication and compilation of publication lists for the individual researchers. In an effort to automate part of the data gathering process, I am also tasked to sort through journals according to subject categories and to identify keywords from a set of relevant article titles. In addition, I was just assigned to investigate the differences between Web of Science and Scopus (two of the major multidisciplinary research databases) in terms of their coverage and evolution over time to determine the implications on university rankings.

Instructional Workshops

With respect to promoting the information literacy on research metrics, the BRIL and I have also partnered up to develop and deliver three library workshops to students and researchers using Microsoft PowerPoint. Hands-on exercises were incorporated into the presentations in an engaging way to more effectively deliver the learning objectives regarding the challenges and solutions of author identification as well as on using multidisciplinary databases to track other researchers and citation trends. Building on the positive feedback from one of the workshop participants, I had brought forward a suggestion to the workshop committee of using patrons’ testimonials as a marketing strategy to promote future library workshops. The idea was well received and is being explored.