The study profiles the efforts of five universities from the USA, Canada and The Netherlands – to develop services in bibliometrics and altmetrics for faculty, students and staff. The five universities profiled are the University of Waterloo, Royal Roads University, Virginia Tech, East Tennessee State University and the University of Delft.
The highly detailed study profiles the day by day experiences of librarians in charge of or otherwise highly involved in bibliometrics and altmetrics efforts and looks at their promotion and assessment efforts and the tools that they subscribe to or have developed or plan to subscribe to or develop. Each profile presents a picture of how one or more librarians confront the day to day challenges of promoting the library’s bibliometric and altmetric services to faculty and the broader university community.
It relates the conferences and information resources that they have found most useful and how they have developed their own information workshops for faculty and staff. They give advice to their peers on how to assess faculty and student needs in bibliometrics/altmetrics, and how to best serve these current and expected future needs. The study also looks at how services for bibliometrics/altmetrics are being integrated into other services for research scholars, and how they are tailored to the needs of different departments and disciplines.
The report helps its readers to benchmark their own university efforts against those of peer universities in three different countries. It also details use of Plum Analytics, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Altmetrics.com, Scopus, SciVal, Pure, Altmetrics Explorer and many other tools in bibliometrics and altmetrics.
The report was written by Dr. Marlies Kirchner. Dr. Kirchner obtained her PhD in library and information science from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Her dissertation dealt with data quality in citation analysis. She held research positions at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, working on Europeana, at iFQ in Berlin, doing follow up research on her dissertation topic and at the Institute of Information Science of Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, where she worked on researchers’ h-index sequences over time. She has published her research in various journals, including JASIST, and in pertinent conference proceedings.