Assessing and tracing the outcomes and impact of research infrastructures

Recent policy shifts on the part of funding agencies and journal publishers are causing changes in the acknowledgment and citation behaviors of scholars. A growing emphasis on open science and reproducibility is changing how authors cite and acknowledge “research infrastructures”—entities that are u...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 2017-06, Vol.68 (6), p.1341-1359
Main Authors: Mayernik, Matthew S., Hart, David L., Maull, Keith E., Weber, Nicholas M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citations
Computing time
Impact analysis
Infrastructure
Reproducibility
Scholarly publishing
Scholars
Software
Software packages
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Summary:Recent policy shifts on the part of funding agencies and journal publishers are causing changes in the acknowledgment and citation behaviors of scholars. A growing emphasis on open science and reproducibility is changing how authors cite and acknowledge “research infrastructures”—entities that are used as inputs to or as underlying foundations for scholarly research, including data sets, software packages, computational models, observational platforms, and computing facilities. At the same time, stakeholder interest in quantitative understanding of impact is spurring increased collection and analysis of metrics related to use of research infrastructures. This article reviews work spanning several decades on tracing and assessing the outcomes and impacts from these kinds of research infrastructures. We discuss how research infrastructures are identified and referenced by scholars in the research literature and how those references are being collected and analyzed for the purposes of evaluating impact. Synthesizing common features of a wide range of studies, we identify notable challenges that impede the analysis of impact metrics for research infrastructures and outline key open research questions that can guide future research and applications related to such metrics.
ISSN:2330-1635
2330-1643
DOI:10.1002/asi.23721