Author Impact Metrics in Communication Sciences and Disorder Research

Area of Science:

• Communication Sciences and Disorders
• Bibliometrics
• Scholarly Impact

Background:

• Assessing faculty scholarly output is crucial for academic institutions.
• Author-level impact metrics provide a quantitative measure of research influence.
• Understanding these metrics within specific fields aids in evaluating academic contributions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine author-level impact metrics for faculty in communication sciences and disorders (CSD).
• To compare metric performance across different databases.
• To identify factors influencing these scholarly metrics.

Main Methods:

• Collected author-level impact metrics for CSD faculty from 257 universities in the US and Canada.
• Utilized Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and Scopus databases for data collection.
• Analyzed metrics based on academic rank, gender, and sub-specialty (audiology vs. speech-language pathology).

Main Results:

• Author-level impact metrics were positively skewed across all databases.
• Metrics significantly increased with academic rank, were higher for men than women, and for audiology faculty compared to speech-language pathology faculty.
• All author-level metrics demonstrated statistically significant positive correlations.

Conclusions:

• Author-level impact metrics can serve as a benchmark for scholarly production in CSD.
• These metrics may assist in professional identity management, tenure and promotion reviews, grant applications, and employment decisions.
• Database selection impacts the visibility and scope of captured author metrics.