Our Mission
Our mission is to support faculty and scholars striving to achieve career goals, fulfill promotion criteria, and meet grant requirements. We are not promoting any agendas such as only publishing in gold open access journals or submitting to journals of a certain tier, etc. Instead, we connect researchers with helpful tools they might have been unaware of, provide consultations to to help authors identify their goals and advise them on the best course to achieve those goals, and demystify what metrics measure in order to avoid data being misapplied. Our view is that scholarly metrics should tell a story about an author’s scholarly works and should always be viewed in context of their discipline, and career stage. A scholar should never be judged by a single metric such as the Impact Factor of their journals.
Meet the Guide Creators
Marc Vinyard and Jaimie Beth Colvin are librarians at Pepperdine who’ve researched journal selection and scholarly metrics in order to advise Pepperdine researchers on best practices, answer questions such as “how many times has my work been cited,” and explain how to find and interpret the ever changing and complex landscape of metrics. They have published an article on the topic, presented at conferences, and wrote a book that was published in early 2022.
Their article is available in Pepperdine's Digital Commons:
Marc Vinyard & Jaimie Beth Colvin (2018) How research becomes impact: Librarians helping faculty use scholarly metrics to select journals, College & Undergraduate Libraries, 25:2, 187-204, DOI: 10.1080/10691316.2018.1464995]
Purpose
This guide is intended to help scholars publish their research. Librarians can assist researchers at different stages of the Research Life Cycle. We are best known for helping scholars “find resources.” This guide highlights library resources and services supporting the last four phases of the Research Life Cycle that address publishing research and understanding the metrics used to measure scholarly impact.
Research Life Cycle
This guide shares Journal Selection strategies and features journal description tools available to the Pepperdine community. Researchers are advised to create profiles that help collect and track their body of work while distinguishing it from research by authors of the same name; Additionally, this guide provides strategies to share one's research with a broader audience while complying with copyright regulations. Lastly, this guide explains what metric tools the Pepperdine community has access to in order to measure impact. Since numbers without context are in the least meaningless and at their worst dangerous when misused, we explain how to interpret and utilize numerical data to help enhance one’s scholarly profile.
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