The ability to assess and communicate the impact of research is a vital skill in today’s academic landscape. McMaster Libraries’ Research Impact Service supports individuals, groups, and departments as they seek to understand the impact of their own work and identify opportunities for extending their reach.Bibliometric analysis utilizes statistical approaches to analyze the publication / citation trends within a given set of publications. This information can be used to guide research methodologies, strategies, and assessment techniques at the University.
The Research Impact team can help researchers and research units understand and express the impact of their work and identify opportunities for mobilizing knowledge and extending their reach. Research impact analysis supports grant/award applications, annual reporting, strategic planning, and more.
Workshop: How Ideas Travel: Introduction to Research Impact
Workshop: Visualizing Your Research Impact
Researcher profile tools like ORCiD and McMaster Experts provide a valuable space to showcase your research outputs (from publications to datasets to creative works) and enable efficient workflows for demonstrating your impact.
Workshop: Establishing & Maintaining Researcher Profiles
Guide: Getting Started with ORCiD
Guide: McMaster Experts User Guide
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), and complementary initiatives like the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), highlight the need for a modernized approach to research assessment that accommodates the diversity of outputs and impacts produced by today's researchers. The Research Impact team can help contextualize these important scholarly movements and provide a better understanding of the implications for impact expression and research assessment at the University.
Persistent identifiers (e.g. digital object identifiers - DOIs), are essential for mapping the influence of individual research objects over time. While persistent identifiers are regularly applied to journal articles and books, alternative research outputs ( e.g. datasets, code, reports, creative works, etc.) and research enablers (e.g. instruments, research software, facilities, etc.) can benefit from the increased discoverability and citability that a persistent identifier provides. The Research Impact team provides and guidance and best practices for the use of persistent identifiers across the schoalrly landscape.
Workshop: Tracking the Impact of Non-Traditional Research Outputs
