Scholarly Impact Report

This LibGuide serves as a self-service guide for researchers looking to demonstrate their work through an impact report. Each section contains relevant information and screenshots of available tools and advice for compiling your report. The guide offers broad guidelines with sections that may need to be tailored to fit discipline specific requirements. Please use the navigation tabs to jump to the next section. 

Each tool outlined in the document is freely available for researchers at UTA. The tools listed will provide specific metrics that you may want to include in your impact report. The metrics listed are those used most often, but we advise that you also consult the tenure and promotion guidelines for your department. 

Finally, if you have not already done so, please download the metrics report template. Combining the tools outlined in the next section with the steps in this guide will help you gather the information necessary to complete your report and demonstrate the scholarly impact of your work. 

In this section, we want to share some of the things we've learned through developing our template. We also want to provide some tips for using this document for your own story about your scholarly work. 

While we've developed a comprehensive template that is geared to cover everything that might be needed for any discipline, it is likely that you won't need everything in this template. We encourage you to delete any sections that are not relevant to your purposes. 

Things to note: 

• Disciplinary differences - We recognize that different disciplines differ in their expectations of impact reporting. While we attempted to make this template as broad as possible, there may be elements we haven't included that are discipline-specific. This document is intended to be more of a guide than a blueprint, so we hope that you can take the format and the principles presented in the sections that we've provided to create your own sections as necessary. 

• Annual differences - Your needs will likely vary by year. While your second-year evaluation may only require information reflected on the first page of this template, your third-year review might require more of the metrics on the subsequent pages. Ultimately, this is your document, and you can make it as thorough as you want to tell the story you want to tell in your evaluation. 

• Time requirements - Thoroughly completing the full template can take a lot of time. That said, it helps if you already have an updated CV and an updated Google Scholar Profile at the ready. Regardless of how prepared you are, if you need to be thorough in your report, we recommend blocking off half a day or so on your calendar to work on it. 

• Purpose of our documents - We've created the template and this documentation to help walk you through the basics of how to identify different impact metrics. We provide the primary tools to help you find your metrics as well as the metrics that are most often used to assess impact. While no document can be comprehensive, we have attempted to include as much information as we can to help you through the whole process of putting together an impact report. 

• Librarian help - Your subject librarian can help you navigate any specific metrics you might need for your discipline. While we cannot complete the report for you, we are certainly here to provide assistance and guidance as needed! We can also consult with you on increasing your impact for the future.