There are many different ways that researchers contribute to progress beyond just the publication of their own results. There is peer review, serving on editorial boards, serving as editors, volunteering in their scholarly community or association, helping plan conferences and participating in promotion, tenure and hiring committees, to name a few. The Scholarly Kitchen brought this interesting news to our attention in their article, “Beyond Publication — Increasing Opportunities For Recognizing All Research Contributions.”
We know that many contributions to research are also made by people who aren’t researchers, such as librarians, data specialists, lab managers, etc. And yet, metrics that focus primarily on citations, primarily of journal articles, remain the tool of choice for many organizations that evaluate research and researchers.
How can the industry expand the ways that research contributions are recognized? The author of the article offers a few options including adopting and/or implementing the Contributor Roles Taxonomy. It is a good starting point for publishers, research institutions or even vendors.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
