10. Successful Librarian-Academic Research Partnerships

Research librarians’ roles are expanding and faculty engagement has become stonger over the years. However, the conventional notion of librarian and researcher collaboration is still often considered to be in the area of management and dissemination of research, instead of partnering with researchers in research projects (White, Monroe-Gulick, & O’Brien, 2013). In addition, there are no established pathways to this transition from traditional librarian roles to being embedded into a research project (Carlson & Kneale, 2011). The purpose of this poster is twofold. Its main purpose is to provide an example of a successful partnership between a librarian and a professor in a longitudinal bibliometric research project. It highlights professional traits and behaviours important for librarians in establishing successful librarian researcher partnerships. It provides suggestions for key contacts in partnership building with researchers. It also summarises challenges and benefits of working closely with researchers to the library, the librarian, the researcher and the department. It also outlines the longitudinal bibliometric project and its results. We studied the citation counts of 146 professors and associate professors at the University of Melbourne. The databases used were Google Scholar, the Web of Science and Scopus. The data was then used to create a new metric hIa (annual individual h-index) that provides more comprehensive picture of the research impact across different disciplines (Harzing, Alakangas & Adams, 2014). In addition, we looked at the coverage and stability of the databases over a two-year period and concluded that all three databases were relatively stable, but had differences in coverage (Harzing & Alakangas, 2016). References Carlson, J. & Kneale, R. (2011). Embedded librarianship in the research context navigating new waters. College & Research Libraries News, 72(3), 167-170. Harzing, A. W. & Alakangas, S. (2016). Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: A longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison. Scientometrics, 106(2), 787-804. Harzing, A. W., Alakangas, S. & Adams, D. (2014). hIa: An individual annual h-index to accommodate disciplinary and career length differences. Scientometrics, 99(3), 811-821. White, G. W., Monroe-Gulick, A. & O’Brien, M. S. (2013, April). Librarians as Partners: Moving from research supporters to research partners. Paper presented in the Association of College & Research Libraries Conference. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2013/papers/GulickOBrienWhite_Librarians.pdf