Summer is the Season for Scholarly Metrics

Take a deep dive into your Scholarly Metrics this summer with PURE, a new Faculty Scholarship system implemented by University Libraries on May 1, 2025. The PURE Faculty Scholarship system shows faculty their scholarly reach through PlumX metrics, which show citations, usage, captures, mentions and social media. PlumX Metrics provide insights into the ways people interact with individual pieces of research output (articles, conference proceedings and book chapters) in the online environment. Examples include research mentioned in the news or included in a policy citation. PlumX gathers and brings together appropriate research metrics for all types of scholarly research output. 

Natalie Lau, Scholarly Communication Librarian, states “we can use PURE for all full-time faculty to ensure their published works, presentations, exhibitions and grants are all represented on their PURE profiles.”  Users can find PURE access and login information here. All data in PURE has been migrated by library staff, it does not use AI to pull in content.

University Libraries creates scholarly metrics reports to assist faculty with the tenure and promotion process. These reports include journal rankings, acceptance rates, citations, h-indices, WorldCat counts, statistics from new PURE Faculty Scholarship system (including usage, social media, public opinion and news mentions) to help faculty prepare their tenure and promotion applications.  This information was previously captured in SelectedWorks, a system which was retired.  Faculty can access PURE using this link or through the PURE chiclet in PirateNet.

John Buschman, associate provost for Research and Innovation and dean of University Libraries states “Scholarly metric reports are required as part of the Seton Hall promotion and tenure process.  These reports enable candidates to have an information baseline about their scholarship.  This is important when colleagues from different disciplines review applications. Candidates need to contextualize their scholarship in a format that can be understood by faculty across disciplines.” Faculty need to demonstrate that an article appeared in a high-ranking journal, the circulation of an article in the popular press and show how an article was picked up in the news, on social media or in Public Opinion sources.

Traditional Metrics include Circulation figures, Citation numbers, External accolades, Journal acceptance rates, Journal impact factors, Journal rankings, PlumX Metrics and Scopus statistics. 

Non-Traditional Metrics include Book publisher reputation, Book reviews, Documentaries, External accolades, Juried exhibits, News Coverage, Open access vs. paywall journals, Social media coverage, Ticket sales or art sales and peer publishing institutions, or exhibiting, performing, presenting in same venues.
 
Best practices suggest faculty provide context about their scholarship. Scholarly Metrics Reports are a launching pad to help provide context about scholarship to other faculty members who are not in your discipline. Therefore, give context about your scholarship within your own discipline and explain the impact of your scholarship to those in other disciplines. All disciplines have different benchmarks, so it is important to spend time thinking about how you can contextualize your scholarship.

It is also important to provide clarity about your scholarship. Give explanation about solo authorship or name placement in articles with a series of authors within the context of your discipline Disciplines such as law or diplomacy do not often have impact factors. Explain this to your review committee How do you explain open access vs. paywall journals within the context of your discipline.  Describe grants applied for and grants won. How does this advance your research agenda and enhance departmental and university recognition? 

Scopus Reports (a SHU database) also provides excellent coverage in the hard sciences and some social sciences. In these disciplines, faculty can search for their author profile that includes Journal rankings, Citations per article, Total citations and Co-authors. Scopus has new reporting features that show document and citation trends and scholarship by source.

Click here to request a Scholarly Metrics Report.  If you have any questions about Pure, please contact [email protected].

Categories: Education, Research