I usually start drafting my annual performance review report in the spring, in anticipation of finishing it before the start of the next fiscal year (June 1 start). Now that I have attained Librarian status, which is the highest promotion level at my institution, I can begin to reflect not just on what was accomplished during the year, but what impact my scholarship has had on the profession. An easy way to think about that is to look at the numbers of citations to publications over the years. My Google Scholar profile shows the articles and books I’ve written/co-authored and the number of times they’ve been cited over time. I wondered though, about how many times they’ve been cited simply over this last year.
I asked #AcademicTwitter if they report this in their own performance review reports. The main response I got from my question was that it was a good idea, so I thought I’d give it a try. This year I added a new section to the professional development part of my report, titled, “Scholarship that cites my work.” It took a bit of time to click through the Google Scholar profile to the citing articles, and count them if they had been published in our last fiscal year (June 2019-May 2020). What I found, though, was that a lot of my work was being used in the profession, not just one or two articles. I’ll see what kind of response I get from those reviewing my report, to decide if I want to continue to include those data in future reports.
Here’s a screen shot of the section from my report:
