An International Perspective on Research Impact from Our Visiting Librarian | Scholarly Publishing in Raiderland

"In my library, the NSLC, there is a research program named iAuthor in the department of Resources Construction. This program was launched in 2014 and it was used to create researchers’ permanent home pages and manage their publications and personal information. The research group of iAuthor collaborated with the ORCID organization in 2015, through register iAuthor researchers can be given their own ORCID IDs. And all the information and publications between iAuthor and ORCID can be synchronized. So, generally, iAuthor is a registration tool for ORCID IDs for Chinese researchers. Now, in China, more than 52,500 researchers have received their ORCID IDs through registering with iAuthor. Most of them are researchers from CAS. CAS has more than one hundred of research institutions and there are a large number of researchers and students, we use the same email system as TTU. The research group of iAuthor automatically registers the iAuthor accounts for all researchers and students of CAS using our email. After registration, the system will send the account information to our email, we just need to activate the account and change the password; Then, we can log in the iAuthor, check our ORCID ID, complete our personal information and add our publications. I think this is a very efficient promotion method.

However, we still use traditional bibliometrics to evaluate the research impact of researchers or institutions in China, like citations from Web of Science or Scopus. Most of the time we don’t accept the citations from Google Scholar. Some Chinese researchers or experts have introduced the advantages of the PlumX or other Altmetrics methods as new evaluation method or the complementary of the traditional evaluation method, but these new concepts have not been widely accepted. But with the development of Altmetrics, Social Media and Open Access, I think the methods used to evaluate outputs will vary."