Search

Join the University Libraries for a presentation for future professors regarding open access, open educational resources, open data, and establishing an online scholarly presence. University Libraries’ faculty Philip Young, Anita Walz, Jonathan Petters, and Rachel Miles will provide a brief overview of each topic, with discussion to follow.

The current landscape of academic incentives, rewards, and assessment practices is beginning to shift and evolve, and though change is slow, it is critical to a healthy academic ecosystem. At Virginia Tech, a large research institution and state university in southwest Virginia, United States; librarians Rachel Miles, Connie Stovall, and Sarah Over of the newly formed Research Impact & Intelligence (RII) Team are helping to ensure that the Virginia Tech research community can competently, ethically, and expertly assess research productivity and impact, benchmark across and against departments, colleges, and other universities; and assess individual faculty members fairly and responsibly. This poster presentation will outline the services, projects, and initiatives provided by the RII Team and how they connect to and complement one another. For example, Rachel has focused much of her work on responsible research assessment efforts within university governance structures and is currently chairing a Faculty Senate Task Force to write the first responsible research assessment statement of principles for the university. In addition, Connie and Rachel work together and individually on research impact reports and research analytics for groups across campus. They also consult with administrators from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, Faculty Affairs, and Academic Resource Management to make recommendations on decisions regarding the use of bibliographic data and bibliometrics. Together, these initiatives and services inform the Virginia Tech research community about its research activities and impacts while providing guidance on proposed policies, the incentive-based budget model, and nuanced bibliographic data interpretation. Published version

As much as we would all like to trust in bibliometrics and research analytics presented to us from visibly intelligent and sophisticated sources and tools, there are those of us expert enough to realize that there is always a wizard behind the curtain. Our awareness of the wizard does not always communicate well to those in Emerald City though, and even when it does, they may acknowledge the wizard but find it difficult to find error in his ways. As bibliometricians and academic librarians, we have all faced a faculty member, researcher, and the administrator who may trust blindly in a proprietary research analytic platform to determine their strengths and weaknesses as a university, college, or other unit. Though these analytic tools provide valuable insights to institutions, it is the over-reliance on these tools that we often struggle to overcome. In this narrative, we sometimes must work with those who are willing to be taken down that metaphorical yellow brick road to discover the wizard behind the curtain themselves. Other times, we find allies and advocates in the university of a more responsible and ethical approach to research metrics. Regardless, when we have patience, we can allow our discussions and their questions to lead us all to a more realistic picture of researcher output and impact. After Glinda the good witch told Dorothy that she only needed to tap her ruby heels together three times to get home, she also pointed out that she could not just tell her this at the beginning of her long journey: “Because she wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.” To be clear, the character Dorothy is not a direct or even fair comparison to research administrators, such as Deans and vice presidents. Administrators, faculty members, and researchers are under a great deal of pressure to support the university community, achieve higher rankings, and meet other external evaluator measures. One way we respond to this need is by promoting ways to approach research evaluation and analytics in a wiser, more responsible manner while also assisting administrators and researchers in tracking, analyzing, and highlighting their academic achievements via a number of databases and tools. Furthermore, sometimes we, as librarians and bibliometricians, may find ourselves in the ruby shoes of Dorothy, learning our own lessons about research impact and evaluation from other perspectives. In our own struggles at Virginia Tech to overcome over-reliance on any sort of Wizard of Research Metrics or Data, we work closely with university administrators across various university levels (e.g., Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, Provost’s Office, Analytics & Institutional Effectiveness) on analyzing colleges’ and departments’ research output via free and proprietary databases and research analytic tools while also providing explanations of the limitations and caveats of such analytics. Over the past two years, our research impact team was invited to speak at three crucial meetings (among others) with the administrators from two colleges and the Associate Deans for Research group. These meetings helped us to communicate and clarify our research impact services and how we can more comprehensively track and analyze research impact while also calling attention to the limitations of bibliographic data sources. In addition, we also work closely with the Elements Implementation Team, which consists of faculty and staff from the Provost’s Office - Faculty Affairs and Institutional Analytics and Effectiveness, and the University Libraries; this team supports administrators and faculty with using the Symplectic Elements system (a Digital Science tool for tracking scholarly information and for faculty activity reporting). As a result of our efforts, collaborations, and presentations over the past two years, there has been an increase in colleges’ implementation and use of the Elements system. We also began pilot projects with two colleges to more comprehensively track faculty scholarship by collecting, importing, and manually entering scholarly output data from their curriculum vitas and scholarly profiles into the Elements system. Finally, we have collaborated with university governance, policies, and administrative partners (e.g. Faculty Senate, Provost’s Office - Institutional Rankings, Faculty Affairs, Academic Resource Management, the Office of Research and Innovation) to solicit feedback and contribute to ongoing institutional discussions and practices related to research metrics, research assessment, data collection, data use, and methods used to support institutional progress towards world rankings and other external evaluator measures; these efforts have helped us become recognized as experts of research impact on campus, but more importantly, they have offered us a voice at institutional discussions regarding metrics, impact, and incentives. This presentation will detail our struggle to overcome some of the misconceptions of research analytics, research impact, and research metrics; to convince administrators and faculty members of the importance of varied bibliographic data sources and data entry; and influencing the larger community through university governance efforts. Published version

This is an overview of scholarly presentations and scholarly publishing, which includes preparing and designing presentation materials, tips for presenting, resources and tutorial links for learning more. The overview of scholarly publishing includes investigating the journal's scope, aim, peer review process, turnaround time, and metrics; topics covered also include publisher copyright policies, Open Access, institutional repositories, and scholarly profiles.

In the digital age of information, undergraduate students often have a difficult time identifying and differentiating among online sources, such as news articles, blog posts, and academic articles. Students generally find these sources online and often struggle to vet them for consistency, context, quality, and validity. In this chapter, we present a new purpose for altmetrics in which librarians teach undergraduates to use altmetrics as a tool to evaluate and differentiate between online mainstream and scholarly sources, which can lead to a deeper understanding of the research process and the engagement and discussion surrounding research as well as an increased ability to evaluate sources more critically. On a more advanced level, students will be able to analyze different levels of inaccuracy and misrepresentation of research from mainstream sources and more accurately identify highly sensationalized research topics from mainstream sources, seminal works of research, and deliberately misleading information and/or fake news. Slides for the learning activity are available at https://sandbox.acrl.org/library-collection/using-altmetrics-evaluate-pseudoscience-news-media Published version Slides for the learning activity are available at https://sandbox.acrl.org/library-collection/using-altmetrics-evaluate-pseudoscience-news-media

Join faculty presenters from around the university, University Libraries faculty, and the Preparing the Future Professoriate graduate class in a robust discussion about nuances, similarities and differences in the "opens." This event begins with brief discussions of open access (OA), open educational resources (OER), and open data before situating this conversation within open access trends in the U.S., Europe, and at Virginia Tech. Presenters and panelists include Jonathan Briganti (University Libraries), Karen DePauw, (Graduate School), Kayla McNabb (University Libraries), Rachel Miles (University Libraries), Derek Mueller (English), Siddartha Roy (Civil and Environmental Engineering), Venkat "Sri" Sridhar (Biological Systems Engineering).

Students engaging in undergraduate research have the opportunity to learn from a mentor, often preparing them for future careers in industry or professional programs. While these students gain high-level, technical research skills, students often do not consider or create marketable deliverables that they can use in the future to influence their career trajectory and curate their online identity. In this session, presenters will work with attendees on pedagogical approaches for teaching undergraduate researchers or others engaging in similar high-impact practices to synthesize their personal, professional, and academic experiences in order to develop research profiles related to career goals and objectives.

This survey research study was conducted by the Faculty Senate Research Assessment Committee at Virginia in the spring of 2019 to determine how faculty at Virginia Tech use researcher profiles and research impact metrics as well as the reasons behind why they use them and how they use them; the survey also assessed how faculty perceive research assessment at the department, college, and university levels, and asked their views on the potential integration of their research into a new incentive-based budget model at the university. The results of this study also help to inform institutional policy reform at Virginia Tech. The results of this study and its implications for practice for researchers, librarians, and scientometricians, was presented at the 6:AM (the sixth) Altmetrics Conference in Stirling, Scotland, United Kingdom. Unpublished (Publication status)

This presentation was provided at the 2019 Digital Science North American User Group meeting. It provides a brief overview of key points from the full presentation, “What Do Faculty Think About Researcher Profiles, Metrics, and Fair Research Assessment?” by Rachel A. Miles, Amanda MacDonald, Nathaniel D. Porter, Virginia Pannabecker, Jim A. Kuypers, presented at the 10th Annual International VIVO Conference, Sep 2019, in Podgorica, Montenegro, http://hdl.handle.net/10919/93360.

Increasingly, scholars are finding that their disciplines and sub-fields overlap and complement one another, leading to more cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations and research projects. A Research Impact Librarian and an Undergraduate Research Services Librarian at a major research institution in the southeastern United States discovered that the overlap in their fields could enhance undergraduate researcher skills and expand the use and purpose of altmetrics. Traditional library instruction often focuses on digital and information literacy skills through keyword development, use of Boolean operators, database navigation, and proper citing of sources but rarely covers concepts related to citation metrics or altmetrics. Unconventional and innovative approaches to library instruction show students that research is not a profession; it is a life skill. Research can, of course, be a major part of someone’s profession, but those who teach research literacy skills have the opportunity to imbue a sense of independence and competence in students unfamiliar with the scholarly conversation. Healthy skepticism, curiosity, exploration, vetting of sources, emotional self-awareness, and a general understanding of human behavior are lifelong research skills that are constantly being honed, reassessed, and developed. Bibliometrics and altmetrics can augment students’ research skills by offering a window into the discussions surrounding research. Librarians can offer a more analytical and critical approach to their research instruction sessions by helping students interpret and decipher the meaning and context behind the metrics. While bibliometrics and altmetrics are traditionally used to assess individual researchers, research institutions, industries, scholarly journals, scholarly societies, and other groups of researchers, this interactive workshop will demonstrate how participants can use altmetrics to teach undergraduate students to engage in the scholarly conversation, develop topics, understand seminal works, evaluate sources, and investigate the motivations behind research metrics in both academic and public spheres.

An emerging tool called altmetrics allows students to more fully engage with and evaluate the conversations surrounding scholarship. Altmetrics represents the online attention to research from sources such as news media outlets, social media, public policy documents, reference managers, blogs, Wikipedia, patents, syllabi, and more. Altmetrics has previously been used by researchers, industry, and research institutions to track the public engagement of scholarship, but this pioneering approach combines undergraduate library instruction with the scholarly conversation to demonstrate the expanding scope of altmetrics in the classroom. The speakers will show how altmetrics can be used to discover broader conversations around research, evaluate scholarly information, and analyze the short-term and long-term influence of scholarly works both in academic and public spheres. Published version

Digital scholarship issues are increasingly prevalent in today’s environment. We are faced with questions of how to protect our own works as well as others’ with responsible attribution and usage, sometimes involving a formal agreement. These may come in the form of Creative Commons Licensing, provisions of the U.S. Copyright Act, or terms of use outlined by contractual agreements with library vendors. Librarians at Eastern Carolina University and Kansas State University (K-State) are among several university libraries now providing services to assist with navigating these sometimes legalistic frameworks. East Carolina University Libraries are taking initiatives to familiarize faculty, researchers, and students with Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Creative Commons Licensing (CCL). At K-State, librarians in digital scholarship and electronic resources identified the overlap of their subject matters through their correspondence regarding users’ copyright and licensing questions; a partnership formed, and they implemented a proactive and public-facing approach to better meet user needs and liability concerns at a major research university. Accepted version Article is in press and will be published in June. Yes, full paper (Peer reviewed?)