Research impact and information management
Research information management (RIM) refers to the collection and reuse of information and data about research and scholarly activities.
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Experts@Minnesota contains public profiles of University faculty and staff, and public pages for departments, colleges, campuses, and centers.
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- ORCID iDs (and why you should have one)
- Connect and automate your scholarly profiles
Research impact
Subject librarians help researchers:
- find and calculate individual, group, journal, and external impact measures,
- get guidance on the strengths and weaknesses of the data,
- gain context for using the tools, and
- build an understanding of what the numbers actually report.
The favored trend employs measures based on citations because they are relatively easy-to-gather, objective data that may indicate a publication's contribution to further research. Deeper investigation reveals complexities in how these measures are calculated and the difficulties of comparing across disciplines that have different research and publication practices.
The ramifications of research may be diverse, wide-ranging, and long-term, and therefore intrinsically hard to measure. The current, competing measures of research impact highlighted in these pages are understandably imperfect. Care should be taken in understanding their merits and limitations.