Martin R. Kalfatovic
Associate Director, Libraries
Smithsonian Institution
Paul Albert
Associate Professor
Weill Cornell Medicine
Terrie Wheeler
Director, Samuel J. Wood Library
Weill Cornell Medicine
“Managing Scholarly Research Output: The Smithsonian Institution Experience” (Kalfatovic) Smithsonian Research Online (SRO) is a key tool in the management of the Smithsonian’s scholarly research output. Comprised of a digital repository, a citation management program, a profiles tool (Smithsonian Profiles), and a scholarly communications team, the SRO program also oversees the Smithsonian’s implementation of the White House’s “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research” mandate. SRO and the recently launched Smithsonian Profiles form an integrated program for the tracking, evaluation, and promotion of the work of Smithsonian scholars across a range of disciplines. A collaboration between the Smithsonian Libraries, the Office of the Chief Information Officer, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, and the Smithsonian Office of Fellowships and Interns, and under the guidance of Deputy Under Secretary for Collections and Interdisciplinary Support, the SRO program provides valuable metrics for both individual researchers, as well as for museums and research centers. This session will outline the overall SRO program and touch upon evaluation and management of scholarship in a non-university environment. The Smithsonian Libraries SRO team of Alvin Hutchinson, Richard Naples, Suzanne Pilsk participated in this presentation.
“VIVO Dashboard: An Interactive Application for Reporting on and Assessing Scholarly Output and Productivity” (Albert, Wheeler) Administrators at academic institutions rely on scholarly impact metrics to allocate scarce resources including funding, promotions, and lab space. Early iterations of scholarly impact metrics including h-index and journal impact factor generally reflect raw counts of citations received by individual articles or authors. In the last several decades, researchers have identified flaws in these approaches and proposed more methodologically defensible alternatives such as PP(top 10%), P(top 10%), and Relative Citation Ratio. These approaches are an improvement, but they are not quite optimized to meet the needs of decision-makers at academic institutions. Here, we describe VIVO Dashboard, an open source interactive web application for assessing scholarly productivity. VIVO Dashboard is a Drupal-based application for analyzing publication metadata. VIVO Dashboard allows end users (primarily administrators) to easily generate reports in one of the three ways: bar graphs, interactive HTML lists, and spreadsheets. End users can facet publication records in a variety of ways including year, publication type, journal ranking, journal name, author name, author type, organizational affiliation, and first-last-author affiliation. Additionally, VIVO Dashboard offers a Citation Impact Map. The Citation Impact Map uses an intuitive non-parametric method for computing field-normalized citation impact for individual academic articles and reviews. Articles are benchmarked against peers sharing the same journal category, publication type, and year. Users can view impact at the level of article, person, and organizational unit. Since its release at Weill Cornell Medicine, a growing number of stakeholders have used VIVO Dashboard to meet their needs of publication reporting and scholarly impact assessment. Deans have used VIVO Dashboard to make tenure decisions. Department chairs have used our application for deciding whether a faculty should help receive a promotion. External Affairs and department administrators have used the application to learn about recent high-profile publications in, respectively, the College and individual departments. VIVO Dashboard is freely available and open source under the Apache 2.0 license.
https://research.si.edu/
https://github.com/wcmc-its/vivodashboard/