2009 Conference Archive

PRESENTATION B6

OPPORTUNITY NOT HARD WORK: SCRIPTED SOLUTIONS TO SOLVING OUR BIBLIOMETRIC NIGHTMARE

Carole Gibbs & Kate Sergeant
University of South Australia Library, Adelaide, SA

University of South Australia (UniSA) management wanted to know who is publishing, where and how often. And they wanted to know yesterday! Researchers wanted to get a list of their publications with citation counts. The Library wanted to provide an ongoing relevant service that assisted the University to measure and assess its research output.

Faced with these challenges the Library established a project to collect the citation counts for all our researchers' publications. Citation searching can be difficult, time consuming and tedious, complicated by incomplete or inaccurate citations. Busy researchers, while keen to know their current citation counts, are much less keen to do it themselves. Searching for each publication's citation count is resource intensive, and we only wanted to do it once.

The Library manually collected citation counts and set up citation alerts in 2006. We built on this work by developing scripted solutions that automatically increment citation counts from the harvested alerts. This paper outlines the new service the UniSA Library has developed to address these challenges when they invariably arise again. In providing a service that helps the University answer some of the hard questions asked about measuring and assessing the University's research outputs, the Library is not only filling its repository with good clean metadata, but also reinforcing the Library's reputation as metadata and bibliometric experts.