Make an Impact! Assessing Scholarly Research and Output while Connecting to your Faculty

This session will explain how to calculate impact factors and other citation metrics for your research and for the work of your faculty. It will also teach you how to frame these discussions and how to use these output measures to make connections with faculty, department chairs, and Deans

Working the Nexus: Teaching students to think, read and problem-solve like a lawyer

Despite a clear case for thinking skills in legal education, the approach to teaching these skills often appears to be implied in law curricula rather than identified explicitly. Thinking skills could be taught as part of reading law and legal problem solving. However, learning the full suite of thinking skills requires active teaching strategies which go beyond exposing students to the text of the law, and training them in its application by solving problem scenarios. The challenge for law teachers is to articulate how to learn legal thinking skills, and to do so at each level of the degree. This article outlines how the nexus between three component skills: critical legal thinking, reading law, and legal problem solving, can be put to work to provide a cohesive and scaffolded approach to the teaching of legal thinking. Although the approach in this article arises from the Smart Casual project, producing discipline-specific professional development resources directed at sessional teachers in law, we suggest that its application is relevant to all law teachers

Critical legal reading: The elements, strategies and dispositions needed to master this essential skill

Alex Steel, Kate Galloway, Mary Heath, Natalie Skead, Mark Israel, Anne Hewit

Embedding Librarians into the STEM Publication Process

STEM Librarians at Syracuse University actively participate throughout the scientific publication process. This chapter will outline points in the process where librarian involvement is applicable and beneficial. Librarians Anne Rauh and Linda Galloway will explain how and why it is important to teach tools that organize scientific literature to faculty and students before they begin the writing process. The use of assessment techniques to help inform targeted publication venues will be described. Post-publication, this chapter will describe how to help authors gauge the impact of their work, promote their publications and increase their visibility

Zotero

Zotero is a free, open access, citation management tool that allows users to store, manage and cite bibliographic references. Zotero can format citations in many different styles and lets users insert citations within word processing software. Zotero allows for easy collaboration between multiple authors and enables users to create private or shared reading lists. Zotero is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. At the completion of this class, participants will be able to: Install Zotero Collect and organize citations Create formatted bibliographies and insert citations into documents Collaborate with colleagues to create reading lists and/or jointly author paper

Social Media and Citation Metrics

Quantifying scholarly output via traditional citation metrics is the time-honored method to gauge academic success. However, as the tentacles of social media spread into professional personas, scholars are interacting more frequently and more meaningfully with these tools. Measuring the influence and impact of scholarly engagement with online tools and networks is gaining importance in academia today. Assessing the impact of a scholar’s work can be measured by evaluating several factors including the number of peer-reviewed publications, citations to these publications and the influence of the publications. These metrics take a relatively long time to accumulate, some are available only via subscription resources, and often measure influence only on a specific scientific community. While these accepted tools provide a means to weigh scholarly output, they do not tell the entire story. Increasingly, scholars are engaging with social media in a professional capacity. From following tweets of fellow conference attendees to hearing about newly published papers, researchers are becoming more reliant upon crowdsourced peer review. As the acceptance of social media and online tools has progressed, interest in employing these tools to gauge academic success has been amplified. There is some very interesting work being done on alternative scholarly metrics, or altmetrics (Priem, Taraborelli, Groth, & Neylon, Cameron, 2010). Some of the more mature tools will be discussed, along with current research that connects social networks with citation metrics (Eysenbach, 2011). In addition, acceptance of these tools in scientific disciplines will be addressed, along with the methods that information professionals can use to help facilitate their use

Introduction to Altmetrics for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Librarians

Quantifying scholarly output via citation metrics is the time-honored method to gauge academic success. Altmetrics, or alternative citation metrics, provide researchers and scholars with new ways to track influence across evolving modes of scholarly communication. This article will give librarians an overview of new trends in measuring scholarly influence, introduce them to altmetrics tools, and encourage them to engage with researchers in discussion of these new metrics