Academic libraries are expanding their service roles in all aspects of the research enterprise at their institutions, including the assessment of research outputs. Evaluation of research performance is necessary for the successful administration of academic departments and research institutions. Tools that facilitate evaluation are of interest to faculty, administrators, and librarians alike. SciVal, an Elsevier research intelligence product, enables libraries to provide in-depth support for evaluation projects that exceeds the standard fulfillment of requests for Journal Impact Factors and h-Indices. Operating on the cache of bibliographic information housed in the Scopus database, SciVal permits benchmarking of research productivity, impact, and collaboration through 15 citation-based metrics that can be calculated alone or in combination as applied to individuals, groups of individuals, or institutions.

At the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the library and the Department of Emergency Medicine used SciVal to benchmark its faculty against those of ten selected peer institutions. This poster describes the benchmarking exercise, including the processes used to select researchers and create research groups in SciVal; the range of bibliographic metrics that were used to evaluate productivity and impact; and the challenges of using citation-based metrics to evaluate faculty groups that include both researchers and clinical practitioners.

This project was the library’s first major evaluation project using Scival and could serve as a model for future benchmarking projects. In addition, by demonstrating the value of SciVal for departmental evaluation, it can inform those looking to use or invest in SciVal as a research analytics tool for their own institutions.