Why don't you read my research?

Why don't you read my research?  My blog tagline is "Informing faith so faith can inform life."  I,like most researchers, hope that my research has an impact: it informs, illuminates, and changes my communities in a positive way.  I want my research to help churches and not-for-profits impact their own communities.  Universities and governments are also interested in researchers' impact.  Institutional reputation, grant funding, and knowledge mobilization are on their minds. 

There is a lot more research out there.  Maybe too much.  There are more PhDs.  The pressure to publish, and publish is more highly ranked journals, is increasing.  There are more journals in traditional and new online formats.  How can I get my research to stand out?

I have reflected on this as an information scientist.  We know how people seek information so why can't we reverse engineer how to make it more "findable" (is that a word?)  Librarians have largely limited their new role to collecting and preserving research through digital repositories.  Although important, this is in many respects still old school collecting.  We have traded brick boxes for digital boxes.  A more exciting role is the championing of Open Access publishing.  This year we will convert our second Law school journal to an online open format.  Where else can we contribute?  As universities focus more on measuring research impact, I am reminded that information scientists like bibliometrician Blaise Cronin have been studying how research was accessed and cited for decades.  This should be familiar territory for us.  I think we need more Blaise Cronins. I think I'll give him a call. :-)

Serving on my faculty's Research Committee has impressed upon me how the question of research dissemination weighs on many minds.  What new skills do researchers have to learn?  What skills might librarians contribute?  This is worth exploring together.  In the meantime with support of my faculty colleagues I have developed a tool to support research dissemination.  What do you think? Are we on the right track?

Research Dissemination (Schulich Law)

Image Credit: Creative Commons License - "impact / impakt / n." by Nick Southall, June 28, 2011, on Flickr .

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