As funding bodies both public and private evolve to accomodate a soaring number of applicants and diminishing pools of funds, they are increasingly looking beyond traditional metrics to evaluate new applicants and past reward recipients. While traditional metrics like H-index, citations, journal impact factor, and journal prestige all speak to the scholarly impact of an applicant, they cannot indicate impact across broader audiences like practitioners (educators, doctors, lawyers, legislators -- non-scholars who use peer-reviewed research in their work), the general public, interested parties, and research communicators (like journalists). Traditional metrics also take months or years to accrue making them lagging indicators of impact in the scholarly pace. They also do not serve early career researchers or researchers working in niche fields with non-traditional research outputs. Altmetrics begin to solve some of these issues by service as qualitative, attention and immediacy indicators. Private and public funders alike are increasingly using these indices to measure not only grants they have funded -- are they in keeping with the funder mission? Are they reaching key audiences? Are they engaging new/emerging communities of interest? -- but to evaluate potential grant applicants and existing applications. This presentation will walk through changes in the grant funding process at public and private funders, a case study outlining why funders are using altmetrics in this way, why they have pivoted to add these new metrics in their evaluation process, and what tools you can bring to your libraries to help support your researchers' grant application efforts.

Quest to find "broader impact": How funding bodies are using altmetrics to evaluate funded research and grant applications

251st National Meeting (2016)

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