Bibilometrics Services and the Academic Library: Meeting the Emerging Needs of the Campus Community

The increasing importance of research assessment is but one factor within the ever-changing scholarly communication landscape that is challenging libraries to develop new services to serve the needs of their academic communities. Institutional budget allocations, grant funding, and faculty tenure and promotion increasingly depend on performance indicators, including bibliometrics such as citation counts, impact factors, the h-index, and other quantitative measurements of research output. With their longstanding expertise in collecting, categorizing, and analyzing data, not to mention their familiarity with scholarly databases and indexes tracking cited references, librarians are well qualified to meet the emerging demand for bibliometrics services.