Points:

• NIH provides 32 billion dollars  in support of biomedical research each year.
• Over 2.4 million articles are now in PubMed Central.
• Every weekday, one half million users access the database, retrieving over 1 million articles.
• An estimated 25% of users are from universities, 17% are from companies, and 40% from the general public.

• How many libraries hold the book in their collections? Check WorldCat to find how many libraries have a record for the book in their collections.
• Are there any book reviews?  To find book reviews, check bibliographic databases that index book reviews, Google Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, publisher websites, to name a few. Some reviews are available in video format.
• Are there any discussions about the book in the Amazon Customer Discussion forum?
• Is the book available in an e-reader format as well as print?
• Has the book been publicly recommended on Google+?
• Has the book been tweeted on Twitter?
• Is the book noted on a publisher’s best-seller list?
• What are the sales figures for the book?
• Has the book been included in bibliographies?
• Has the book or book chapter been cited in subsequent publications? Some bibliographic databases provide citation data to book or book chapters from scholarly literature. One example of a database is the Thomson Reuters Book Citation Index.
• Has the author been invited to present on the topic related to the book or book chapter?
• Has the author been invited to book signings?
• Are there subsequent editions to the book?
• Has your book been awarded any prizes such as the PROSE Award or noted by an organization as having made a significant contribution to a field?

Any others?

“Citation analysis is not a substitute or shortcut for critical thinking; it is, instead, a point of departure for those willing to explore the avenues to thorough evaluation . . . citations tell us nothing about a researcher’s teaching ability, administrative talent, or other non-scholarly contributions. And they do not necessarily reflect the usefulness of research for curing disease, finding new drugs, and so on.”  [Source: Current Contents, (43): 3-9, October 28, 1985.]

Examples of “points of departure” for review of research impact:

Economic Impact Reporting Framework, Medical Research Council

Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative, Australian Research Council

Logic Model for Medical Research, Anthony Weiss

Mixed-Method Approach, Trochim, William M., et al.

Payback Framework, Health Economics Research Group (HERG)

Research Impact Framework, Kuruvilla, Shyama, et al.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: What Retractions Say About Scientific Transparency.

Estelle Brodman: How to Write a Paper

Dr. Estelle Brodman, former director of Bernard Becker Medical Library, presented this paper to the Department of Dermatology at Columbia University in 1947. Many of the points Dr. Brodman outlines in the presentation are still relevant today. For more information on Dr. Brodman, visit her oral history page.

The Consort Statement: CONSORT 2010

CONSORT 2010 is intended to improve the reporting of a randomized controlled trial (RCT), enabling readers to understand a trial’s design, conduct, analysis and interpretation, and to assess the validity of its results. It includes guidance in the form of a check-list for the Title, Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Other Information for a manuscript.

American Chemical Society: Publishing Your Research 101 Series

The Publishing Your Research 101 video series, produced by ACS Publications, is designed to assist authors and reviewers in understanding and improving their experience with the processes of writing, submitting, editing, and reviewing manuscripts.

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Preparing a Manuscript for Submission to a Biomedical Journal

ICMJE outlines general principles for preparing manuscripts for submission to a journal.

“Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.”

Not sure about the authorship order of a work? Check out Authorder. Authorder® is a free, easy-to-use tool to allocate authorship order on publications.

Check out this guide on how get started using Twitter to use for scholarly efforts.

To learn more about the effect of the length of a title and punctuation, read the entire article by Sarah Huggett in Research Trends, September 2011.