Research Support for Faculty

There are many different ways to measure the reach and impact of your scholarship. A typical approach considers the quality of publication venues as well as some measure of how often your work is cited. There are also approaches that try to measure the impact of research beyond the sphere of journals; this alternative approach to metrics is sometimes called “altmetrics.”

The use of any particular measure and the importance of those measures depends on the standards within a given academic discipline and even more specifically within a particular department. Consult your departmental collegial review document to see if and how your department measures impact.

For detailed information on measuring research impact, follow the link below.

Add your work to NC DOCKS

Depositing your scholarship to NC DOCKS, WCU's institutional repository, is an easy and effective way to increase the reach of your research. Scholarship deposited to NC DOCKS appears in Google searches, and researchers worldwide have continuous and perpetual access to publications in NC DOCKS at no cost.

For information about submitting your work to NC DOCKS, visit the link below or email Scottie Kapel, Scholarly Communications Librarian, at skapel@wcu.edu.

Get a persistent identifier

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are permanent and reliable references to resources. DOIs, which identify content such as journal articles and datasets. are one form of PID. There are also PIDs for individual researchers, which clearly link a person to their scholarly output. Two common researcher PIDs are ORCID iD and Research ID, both of which provide PIDs at no cost to researchers.

Follow the link below to learn more.