Starting to assess the broader impact of your published work

Goodier, Sarah

Starting to assess the broader impact of your published work

Other

2013-05

Publisher

University of Cape Town. OpenUCT

University of Cape Town

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/za/

Abstract

Academics, researchers and postgrad students everywhere know the drill of publishing an article: do the research, write the paper, submit it to a journal (or several, after it's initially rejected) and after dealing with reviewer comments and edits, you reach the proud moment when you see your research paper published. After this, to see how your paper has been received by the scholarly community, you wait to see the citations your paper accumulates over time. However, citations can have a long lag time after publication. So, you may have to wait a long while to see who's been reading your paper and how they are using it in conducting and writing up their own research. And even then, the citations are only a part of the story. They can't give you an idea of how many people may have come across your article online and bookmarked it or shared it with colleagues, NGOs or their communities. The citations in academic publications leave you with no sense of how other readers, beyond the limited number academic community members who included your work in their reference lists, might be interacting with your work.

Reference:

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Teaching and Learning

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