New article: “Scholarly Communication Librarians’ Relationship with Research Impact Indicators: An Analysis of a National Survey of Academic Librarians in the United States”

The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication just published “Scholarly Communication Librarians’ Relationship with Research Impact Indicators: An Analysis of a National Survey of Academic Librarians in the United States“.

This is the final publication related a topic I’ve been working on since 2013 (!), when I first realized that although academic librarians were interested in research metrics, no one had yet studied the reality of how they were using these kinds of indicators in their day-to-day jobs and in support of their own careers.

Along the way, I’ve been privileged to work with Sarah Sutton and Rachel Miles (and for a short period, Michael Levine-Clark) on a series of publications and presentations that include:

We ultimately learned that:

  • Your seniority/years of experience has no effect upon how familiar you are likely to be with various research metrics
  • Librarians and LIS educators alike are more familiar with traditional research impact metrics like the JIF than they are with altmetrics
  • Altmetrics are least likely to be used for collection development, though this is a use case I’ve been promoting for a long time
  • The more scholcomm-related duties you have in your job, the more you’ll use metrics of all kinds
  • Altmetric is the most popular altmetrics database used by librarians 😎

Sarah and Rachel plan to carry this path of research forward, expanding the scope of the study to include librarians worldwide, and also possibly looking at library promotion and tenure documents’ discussion of metrics. I wish them the very best and want to once again express my gratitude towards them as collaborators: Ladies, I hope to work with you both again in the future!

Stacy Konkiel
Stacy Konkiel
Professional Data Wrangler 🤠

Stacy Konkiel is a data analyst.