Washington University School of Medicine’s Becker Medical Library is pleased to announce the launch of a new website, Assessing the Impact of Research. Realizing that now, more than ever, researchers need to be aware of the impact of their biomedical research, a team at the library has developed a Model for Assessment of Research Impact that provides a practical, do-it-yourself tool for tracking the post-publication effect/influence of that research. In addition to the Model, the site provides an in-depth analysis of the different kinds of research impact and their significance. Included are both guidance for quantifying and documenting research impact and resources for locating evidence of research impact. The website also includes strategies that investigators can utilize in order to enhance the diffusion of research output generated by a clinical or bench study.

For more information, contact Cathy Sarli of the Becker Medical Library.

Excellent review of the research process that discusses the long road from the initial discovery of a medical intervention to a highly cited article. Among the recommendations made by the authors:

1. Scientists should convey to funders and the public the immense difficulty of the scientific discovery process.

2. Multidisciplinary collaboration with focused targets and involving both basic and clinical sciences should be encouraged.

3. Discovery of new substances and interventions remains essential, but proper credit and incentives should be given to accelerate the testing of these applications in high-quality, unbiased clinical research and the replication of claims for effectiveness.

 One tool that you can use to find out who is citing your work is the Author Finder tool in the Web of Science database. Author Finder will produce a list of publications by a particular author that are indexed in the database.  Once a search is completed, a Citation Report provides the number of publications found for a particular author; the number of times the publications were cited by other publications and a list of those publications; the average number of citations per publication; and the h index of the author.  There is also an option to modify the report by excluding self-citations.

The ethical case for Open Access (OA) (free online access) to research findings is especially salient when it is public health that is being compromised by needless access restrictions. But the ethical imperative for OA is far more general: It applies to all scientific and scholarly research findings published in peer-reviewed journals. And peer-to-peer access is far more important than direct public access. Most research is funded to be conducted and published, by researchers, in order to be taken up, used, and built upon in further research and applications, again by researchers, for the benefit of the public that funded it — not in order to generate revenue for the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry (nor even because there is a burning public desire to read [much of] it). Hence OA needs to be mandated for all research.