2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

productivity.
18
BEST PRACTICES 2012
In addition to using the off-the-shelf tools,
organizations can also choose to harvest
those tools through APIs or data
purchases to create an internal list of
publications. A number of Federal
agencies including NASA have created
internal databases of agency-publications
and I firmly believe that libraries have a
clear role to play in this.
The National Library of Medicine and the
Department of Energy also have robust
efforts to capture all publications resulting
from research and funding. I recall Dr.
Zerhouni, then Director of NIH, pushed for
the deposit of publications derived from
research grants specifically so that he
could have a tool to measure research
Whether the list is built in PubMed, in an internal database or using commercial database
tools such as Scopus or Web of Science, a focused list of publications of a research
organization or department allows libraries to build a slate of measures.
The commercial database providers also
recognize that there is a market for this
so they’ve started to move beyond raw
information and started creating products
based upon the vast wealth of information
they sit on. Here’s a snapshot of Elsevier’s
portfolio analysis tool, based upon their
Scopus data.
Some organizations like the National
Institutes of Health has also been
fortunate enough to have the resources to
work with A&I providers to create robust,
custom views of their organizations’ data.
In a contract with Collexis/Elsevier, the
NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting
Figure 6 - Elsevier Portfolio Analysis Tool
Tools (or REPORT) which is a tool designed
to support the extramural research
community, providing per-year data on grants, and disease portfolios. It allows users to
search a repository of both intramural and extramural NIH-funded research projects from
the past 25 years and access publications (since 1985) and patents resulting from NIH
funding.
In addition, through a contract with Discovery Logic/Thomson Reuters, the NIH Electronic
Scientific Portfolio Assistant or eSPA is a tool that helps the intramural community to
evaluate the outcomes (including outputs and impact) of NIH funding.