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 [...]

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Despina G. Contopoulos-Ioannidis, George A. Alexiou, Theodore C. Gouvias, and John P. A. Ioannidis, “Life Cycle of Translational Research for Medical Interventions,” Science (5 September 2008) Vol. 321, no. 5894, 1298 – 1299.
Excellent review of the research process that discusses the long road from the initial discovery of a medical intervention to a highly cited article. [...]

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The International Mathematical Union just released a Citation Statistics Report that outlines the use of citations in assessing research quality.
Among the report’s key findings:
1.  Statistics are not more accurate when they are improperly used; statistics can mislead when they are misused or misunderstood.
2. The objectivity of citations is illusory because the meaning of citations is [...]

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The h-index is a new metric for assessing the impact of research by an individual author. The h-index, developed by J.E. Hirsch, is based on the number of publications produced by an author and the distribution of citations in other publications. Hirsch defines the h-index as:
“A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np [...]

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Interesting manuscript by Steven Harnad that discusses the importance of open access for biomedical research findings. Abstract:
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 [...]

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“Sharing Detailed Research Data is Associated with Increased Citation Rate“ documents a study of cancer microarray clinical trial publications in which a correlation between publicly available microarray data and increased literature impact was found.

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Interesting newsletter article from Elsevier on intellectual impact.
http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcn/0503/lcn050302.html

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