Tools for tenure: Highlighting resources for research assessment

Congratulations on making it to the end of another semester. Now that finals are finished and commencement complete, perhaps your thoughts are turning to what your professional life will look like for the next few months. With that in mind, I want to dedicate this final blog post before the summer hiatus to a discussion of a few freely available tools that can make collecting scholarly impact metrics a little easier for those that require it for the tenure and promotion process. This can be a somewhat tedious–if mindless–task, so the summer break is a perfect time to get a head start. 

Before we get to that though, it is important to emphasize the limitations of a strictly quantitative approach to research assessment. The quality of your scholarship cannot be adequately represented by numbers alone, and they should only be a part of the story you tell about the importance of your work. Several organizations champion this sentiment: Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), Leiden Manifesto, and CoARA to name a few. DORA especially is a great place to go for (open!) resources and tools related to research assessment. For example, this 2024 report provides guidance on the responsible use of metrics and gives succinct insight into some of the issues with a few of the more common measures like journal impact factor, citations, and h-index. Finally, remember that there are additional ways for you to demonstrate impact, including the Altmetric Attention Score and employing the use of a narrative CV. 

Still, it is important to acknowledge that many academics are asked to provide these metrics as part of the T&P process, so let’s talk about some tools that can help support you in that.  

Metrics Toolkit 

First, I encourage you to read through the Metrics Toolkit. This resource provides an especially thorough introduction to many of the more common metrics used to evaluate impact. Each entry includes a definition, who or what the metric applies to, how it is calculated, data sources, appropriate and inappropriate uses, limitations, and more. Utilizing this resource can give you insight into the good, the bad, and the ugly for many of the measures you may be asked to provide in a promotion dossier and can help you make the argument that they should not be the sole measure of your worth as a scholar. 

UTA Libraries’ Scholarly Impact Report 

Next, did you know that UTA Libraries provides a template to help with the process of collecting and presenting impact metrics? You can download the template and read our guide to collecting author, article, journal, and book related metrics here. This template is designed to be discipline agnostic and provide you with several different options for quantifying the impact of your work. As such, it probably includes more than what you need, so please feel to edit it to tell the best version of your story.  

While this template provides guidance on measuring many types of impact, there are a few limitations that are important to address. First, it doesn’t explicitly provide guidance on how to talk about OER. You can use the suggestions in the book section to get started and can reach out to UTA Libraries’ OER department at oer@uta.edu for usage statistics as well. I also like some of the measures that the University of Massachusetts Amherst Library suggests here. 

Another limitation of the current template is that it centers print-based methods of research dissemination and lacks robust guidance on outputs that aren't easily captured by metrics, like performances, exhibitions, digital scholarship projects, etc. While an update is planned for the future, for now I will point you to a guide by our neighbors at UNT that has good information on how to demonstrate impact for other types of faculty creative work. 

Publish or Perish 

Finally, I want to highlight Publish or Perish (PoP), a tool developed by Anne-Wil Harzing to give academics access to a number of different citation metrics to use for the T&P process. PoP can be linked to several different citation databases, some freely available like Google Scholar and OpenAlex. The Scholarly Impact Report documentation demonstrates how to link your Google Scholar Profile to Publish or Perish for the purpose of gathering data for the Author Summary, but article-level metrics are available as well. Also, if you rely on Google Scholar data when using PoP, please ensure that you do some critical assessment of the publications that are pulled in since not everything collected by Google Scholar is from a scholarly source.  

Harzing has written about many additional use cases too, including conducting a literature review, using it for journal selection, and even preparing for a job interview. And more recently, PoP has sometimes been used in evidence synthesis to help export Google Scholar results in bulk. It really is a versatile tool. 

I hope that these resources have given you a place to start with regards to collecting data that supports the impact your scholarship has made. If you have any questions, I encourage you to reach out to your subject librarian. They are the bridge between your department and library services and are a great resource for connecting you to all that UTA Libraries has to offer. 

The cover image for this blog post is a modified version of "Evaluate" by Nick Youngson, made available under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license and accessed at Picpedia.org on May 21, 2024. It was modified to add the orange "Open @ UTA Libraries" banner.