Leaving a paper trail: tracking scholarly legacy with bibliometrics

Description

Although in our day-today work we tend to use bibliometrics for some immediate use, such as to support a grant application or a tenure or promotion package, we are interested in viewing bibliometrics through a different lens and timeline: to determine how bibliometrics might be used to establish an individual scholarly legacy and how bibliometric patterns over a researcher's career and across their body of work indicates both immediate impact and long-term legacy. We are exploring how biomedical researchers at different stages of their careers view scholarly legacy: general attitudes on legacy, views on both their individual contributions and what it means to "contribute" to a research field, and to what, if any, extent they view bibliometrics as conferring impact or validation of their work. To that end, we are interviewing early-career and late-career biomedical researchers individually to determine what, if any, patterns arise among and between researchers at different stages of their careers. Additionally, we are creating publication summaries for each of the interviewees to create well-rounded overviews of the traditional bibliometrics and alternative metrics for their research outputs.

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