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.

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 not well-understood. A citation’s meaning can be very far from “impact.”

3. While having a single number to judge quality is indeed simple, it can lead to a shallow under-standing of something as complicated as research. Numbers are not inherently superior to sound judgments.

“A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np – h) papers have no more than h citations each.”
In other words, a scholar with an index of h has published h papers with at least h citations each. The h-index is the result of the balance between the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. It is designed to improve upon simpler measures such as the total number of citations or publications.

Hirsch, J.E. An Index to Quantify an Individual’s Scientific Research Output, 2005.

Becker Library provides access to SCOPUS, a database that includes a tool to compute the h-index for articles published after 1996.  For WU Authors: Contact Cathy Sarli to request your h-index.

 Related articles on the h-index:

Ball, Philip. Index Aims for Fair Ranking of Scientists. Nature, 436, 900, August 18, 2005.

Harzing, Anne-Wil. Reflections on the h-index. 2007.

Roediger, Henry. The h index in Science: A New Measure of Scholarly Contribution.  The Academic Observer, 19(4), April 2006.

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.

http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcn/0503/lcn050302.html