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Evaluating Scholarly Publications for Tenure and Promotion: Introduction

This guide will help you find evidence of the value of your publications to use in your FAR.

Introduction

This guide will help you find evidence of the quality, value, or impact of your scholarly work and creativity. It is also a tool to help you understand the quality and impact of your colleagues' work even if you are unfamiliar with publication practices or creative activities in their discipline. The guide is not exhaustive, and you may use other methods to demonstrate the value of your research/creativity as appropriate. Please let us know if you use methods that we should add to this guide.

Not all metrics and methods described in this guide are appropriate to every discipline or type of creative activity. Select those that are most relevant for your publications and activities.

Ask Us For Help!

We encourage you to ask your subject librarian for help with gathering evidence of your scholarship and creative activity. 

Becker Model for Assessing the Impact of Research

The Becker Model gives a framework for tracking the diffusion of research outputs and allows users to determine different types of impact. Note that this was developed specifically for biomedical research so it may take some alterations to fit other fields.

Specific categories of benefits:

  • Advancement of Knowledge
  • Clinical Implementation
  • Community Benefit
  • Legislation and Policy
  • Economic Benefit

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License image  Assessing the Impact of Research is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Publish or Perish Software

This free software retrieves and analyzes citations from Google Scholar, PubMed, Microsoft Academic, and several other sources. It provides these metrics, among others:

  • Total number of papers and total number of citations
  • Average citations per paper, citations per author, papers per author, and citations per year
  • Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
  • Average annual increase in an individual's h-index
  • Egghe's g-index
  • Age-weighted citation rate
  • Number of authors per paper.

You can export citations to EndNote, BibTeX, CSV, and several other formats.

See details or download  the software for Windows, Mac OS X, or GNU/Linux here.
NOTE: DOWNLOAD TO HOME COMPUTER ONLY; REQUEST APPROVAL FROM I.T. BEFORE DOWNLOADING TO A WORK COMPUTER.