Bibliometrics & Research Impact Community Conference
Ottawa, Canada
June 2023
The 2023 Bibliometrics and Research Impact Community Conference was held in Ottawa, at St. Paul University, on June 6th – 8th. The conference included attendees from across Canada, the US, and Europe. This was my second time attending this conference, and I hope it won’t be the last! This year attendees included librarians, industry professionals from national research labs, representatives from companies like Digital Science, Coherent Digital, Clarivate, and more. The conference has a very close-knit community feel and is one of the only conferences in North America that focuses on research impact. People come together to learn about topics like metrics (counts or attention received by published scholarly or creative works, authors, journals, etc.); bibliometrics (analyses of metrics); responsible research assessment; outreach and research impact use cases with community stakeholders; and research impact tools (such as databases that include reporting and analyses features like Dimensions, SciVal, and Lens).
This conference felt special because I attended with 3 colleagues from Syracuse University Libraries, who are all members with me on our Research Impact Team. In 2020, the Syracuse University Libraries’ Department of Research and Scholarship created four teams of liaison and functional specialists to focus on areas including research impact, digital and open scholarship, instruction, and collections. Our research impact team works with graduate students, faculty, staff, and administrators across campus to support activities like gathering statistics and counts of attention (metrics) for faculty going up for tenure or promotion, co-managing our Research Information Management System (RIM), and providing guidance on the responsible use of research metrics across disciplines. The conference provided a unique opportunity for our team to have a shared experience while learning about new ways we can support the Syracuse University community and networking with key professionals in the research impact and bibliometrics community.
At the conference, my colleague, Stephanie McReynolds, Librarian for Business, Management, and Entrepreneurship, and I, gave a presentation on the freely available set of literature and patent databases that make up Lens.org, along with the subscription component of these databases, Lens Institutional Tool Kit (ITK). The presentation was titled, A new “Lens” – Exploring new tools for research impact reporting. We are one of a handful of institutions in North America that subscribe to this new product. The ITK focuses primarily on reporting and bibliometrics and uses content from the Lens databases to populate the reporting modules. The Syracuse University Libraries’ subscription to this product helps cover the costs of the Lens databases remaining freely available.
My favorite conference session was given by a leader in the field of bibliometrics and research impact in the U.S., Rachel Miles, from Virginia Tech. The talk, Responsible use of what?’ Navigating US university governance to approve an institutional statement on the responsible use of metrics, focused on Rachel’s work championing responsible research assessment and metrics, specifically work establishing a sub-committee of their university senate. The goal of the subcommittee and Rachel’s work is to address fair and responsible use of metrics at Virginia Tech in processes like faculty annual reviews, tenure, and promotion. Rachel’s presentation, as well as mine and others from this year’s conference, should be available for free through the conference website, under “Past Conferences” within the next few weeks.
A huge thank you to the Central New York Library Resources Council for the generous scholarship, which covered the cost of the conference registration and made it affordable for me to attend the conference and present.
Emily Hart
Science Librarian & Research Impact Lead, Syracuse University
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