Implementing a Scholarly Impact Outreach Program for Faculty and Graduate Students

There are two intersecting realities in research and academia today: There are greater expectations for individual faculty and academic departments to substantively demonstrate evidence of research productivity and impact for such applications as promotion and tenure, annual reporting, and benchmarking. Graduate students require knowledge of top articles and researchers in their discipline and those pursuing a career as faculty need to know how to determine their impact towards promotion and tenure. Database vendors and other content providers are regularly developing and offering robust, yet user-friendly, bibliometric and altmetric tools within current as well as new products. Many of the tools are interdisciplinary or generalist in scope, while some are optimal for certain subject clusters. In response to these realities, academic librarians are increasingly offering new or expanded scholarly impact services for faculty and graduate students in the form of activities such as library workshops, research guides, and individual consultations to promote and demonstrate the range of available bibliometric and altmetric tools. This poster will outline the components of developing and implementing a scholarly impact outreach program including challenges, assessment, and suggested readings from the library literature on this topic. Poster content is based on the article below: Helmstutler, B. (2015). Taking research services to the next level: A case study of implementing a scholarly impact outreach program for faculty and graduate students. Journal of Library Innovation, 6(2), 96-104. http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/univ_lib_facpub/119/