The Department of Research Assessment and Communications supports Feinberg School of Medicine by providing expertise in bibliometrics and alternative metrics, information visualization for research assessment, and advisory services for increasing the visibility and accessibility of research in a digital environment.

The Department of Research Assessment and Communications provides expertise in:

Bibliometrics and Alternative Metrics. We provide reliable, consistent, and transparent metrics for assessing research impact using the latest bibliometric techniques. We generate reports and put these metrics into context to better understand how scholarship is influencing other researchers and disciplines.  

Research Communication. We provide information on publishing strategies and making scholarship openly available through the institutional repository. We provide support for strategic dissemination of scholarly outputs to increase their discoverability and accessibility to the global community.

Information Visualization. We provide visualizations to facilitate stronger comprehension of data in the assessment process. Our visualizations help identify collaboration networks among researchers, trends in research topics over time, and the citation impact of publications.

Communicating research impact. We work with researchers to better communicate the impact of their work across their discipline and to outside audiences. These efforts often require focused discussions on what impact means beyond the use of bibliometrics.   

Curating and Exhibiting Scholarship. We assist students, researchers, and staff in preserving, curating, and exhibiting their scholarship online through the institutional repository and other digital tools available to the Northwestern community.  

Our department is involved in several major initiatives on behalf of the Feinberg School of Medicine and in collaboration with other departments at Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center. These projects include:

Metrics and Impact Core. The Metrics and Impact Core is housed within our department and provides expertise in managing or tracking publications, measuring research impact by discipline, and communicating research impact to various audiences.

Prism. Prism is Northwestern Medicine’s institutional repository for making scholarship openly available and discoverable to the world. Prism preserves intellectual works created by the Northwestern Medicine scholarly community and enhances the visibility of Northwestern Medicine scholarship.

ORCiD Integration. ORCiD is a persistent unique identifier, often described as a “researcher’s social security number” that distinguishes researchers from one another. Feinberg School of Medicine has committed to assisting our researchers establish an ORCiD and connect their ORCiD to their Northwestern NetID.

Northwestern Elements. Northwestern Elements is a web-based system that provides a continuous and dynamic feed of publication information from multiple sources. It can be used to collect and analyze research output, and can help keep track of professional activities and publications.

Please contact us using this web form.

We offer regularly scheduled workshops and classes on these topics:

• Prism: collect, share, and preserve the full spectrum of your work
• Altmetrics: Tracking the Impact of Your Work in Real-Time
• Enhancing the Impact of Your Research

See our current class schedule

We work to curate information, organize resources, and provide helpful documentation through our library guides. See our guides on these topics:

• Altmetrics
• Creating an NIH Biosketch
• Metrics and Impact Core
• Web of Science
• Open Access Publishing Guide
• ORCID
• Prism
• Northwestern Elements

See our list of research guides