Health Sciences Library helps UNC Demonstrate Impact

By Terri Ottosen • March 9, 2018

The Health Sciences Library Impact Measurement and Visualization Team partners with the UNC at Chapel Hill community to demonstrate collaboration and expertise in research, education, and clinical care.

The Health Sciences Library (HSL) has launched a new Impact Measurement and Visualization (IMV) Service as part of its suite of services. IMV specialists partner with research groups, academic schools and clinical departments, and individual faculty in the following ways:

Empowering researchers

Communicate research impact to audiences such as funders or promotion and tenure committees
Manage and track publications
Measure and assess research impact by discipline area
Reveal research topic trends and patterns

Enabling administrators

Identify patterns, trends, and gaps in unit-supported research, education or clinical care activities
Bibliometric analysis & visualization of research publications and other outputs by a specific group
Discover the scope and pattern of research collaborations (e.g. author, institution, and country collaboration)

IMV specialists use a wide collection of resources and tools for this work. These include citation databases and citation network analysis and visualization tools, such as Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, iCite, VOSviewer, Tableau, Sci2, and Gephi.

The HSL IMV team recently collaborated with the graduate program at UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy (ESOP) to conduct a series of bibliometric analyses of ESOP publication citations to examine and visualize: 1) collaboration patterns among ESOP faculty, students, and UNC-associated researchers, and 2) related topics of study, as indicated through research output. One of the topic analysis visualizations produced for this project can be seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy Research Topics

The HSL IMV team has worked with many other groups, including Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, School of Nursing, School of Education, Center for Health Equity Research, and has an ongoing program evaluation partnership with the NC Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS).

To learn more about HSL’s IMV service, analysis process, and outputs, please visit:

Health Sciences Library Impact Measurement & Visualization site and contact information: https://hsl.lib.unc.edu//impact
Yu, Fei, and Barrie E. Hayes. 2018. “Applying Data Analytics and Visualization to Assessing the Research Impact of the Cancer Cell Biology (CCB) Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.” Journal of eScience Librarianship 7(1): e1123. https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2018.1123