Research impact for engineering: A National survey of engineering librarians

Abstract

In recent years, the demand on scholars and institutions worldwide to demonstrate their research impact has become an increasingly important part of funding applications, promotion dossiers and ranking analytics. The need for impact assessment has steered the development of metrics, altmetrics, and metrics services. Some research metric services have been in place at academic institutions around the world. Certain nations have even adopted nationwide assessment programs. However, in the United States this has not been the case. Recently, some United States academic libraries have established formal research metric services, but the extent of these services and the involvement of engineering librarians have not been explored. The authors are conducting a survey of engineering librarians at institutions in the United States with Very High (RU/VH) and High Research Activity (RU/H) Carnegie Classifications. The survey will explore engineering librarians' perceptions and understanding of research impact and metrics, including traditional bibliometrics and alternative metrics. The authors hope that the survey results will help identify the most useful metrics and tools to assess broader impact of different engineering disciplines. The survey will also establish a benchmark of formally established research metric services and the extent to which engineering librarians are directly involved. Engineering librarians can be inspired to help capture research dollars by assisting engineering researchers in gathering evidence of their research impact.