Bibliometric analysis of scholarly output of a university’s faculty, particularly focused on publications involving co-authors based outside the U.S, is one of several metrics to assess a university’s global research engagement. These dashboards display information on scholarly publications by authors affiliated with the University of Kentucky, as indexed by Elsevier.
Several variations of international publication metrics are in these dashboards: the number of international co-authorships; the percentage of change in international co-authorships over time; total citations of these publications, and field-weighted impact factors. These metrics can be filtered by subject areas (as defined by the Times Higher Education) as well as the country of co-authors.
The visualizations present UK’s research publication output for a five-period. “Total # of citations” counts the instances a scholarly publication is cited by other researchers. “Avg. field-weighted impact” compares the total citations a publication receives with the average number of citations a publication in the same subject area receives. This helps to normalize analysis of scholarly publication data across disciplines. For example, researchers working in fields such as biochemistry typically produce more publications with more co-authors than researchers working in fields such as mathematics and education. The ‘avg. field weighted impact’ data makes comparison across these disciplines possible, though differences reflect research culture, not performance or quality.