Craft Your Impact Story
Files for action Documentation submitted to an institution for consideration of a researcher maintaining a position, being promoted, and/or receiving tenure., such for tenure, reappointment, or increase in rank, often require both narrative and supporting documentation to demonstrate that you have met (or exceeded!) scholarship expectations. Which components belong in each section is highly institution-specific, so you’ll want to talk to colleagues, read institutional guidance, and review any available colleagues’ previous promotion and tenure packets for assistance.
Typically, the narrative is the place to summarize and contextualize your work — here, you’ll include some of the impact highlights and discuss the broader trajectory of your scholarship. Some questions that a narrative would help to answer include:
- How have you established or increased your reputation as a scholar?
- Do you have a scholarly “niche” area? If not, what are the common threads or themes that tie together your separate research topics or threads?
- Where do you see your “scholarly trajectory” heading in the coming years? Here, you can discuss your “works in progress” and your future scholarly direction and larger goals you might be striving for.
Regardless of whether you are pursuing tenure, discussing accomplishments can be a difficult skill for many librarians. Narratives are typically not demure or understated — they should succinctly, but compellingly, communicate your achievements and demonstrate pride in your accomplishments. The metrics and measures in this lesson are all designed to help showcase your scholarship to its fullest potential and demonstrate how your scholarship is making a difference. However, because narratives are relatively brief, you’ll want to highlight your greatest successes and explain how they fit into your overall goals and journey regarding scholarship.
While the narrative section tells your scholarship story, the documentation section offers evidence that backs up your claims. All the metrics and measures that you have gathered about your work belong in the documentation section. This portion is where you can highlight the impact of individual outputs and include higher-level metrics (such as the chart of yearly citation counts that Google Scholar produces). Often, this is also an appropriate place to contextualize the research itself — for example, you can explain why you chose to publish in a particular journal, the nature of your contribution to co-produced scholarship, or some additional qualitative impact measures or stories. There are many ways to structure the documentation portion. Again, you’ll want to pay attention to institutional expectations and norms so you can highlight your scholarship effectively.
To review the difference between narrative and documentation support, the narrative will discuss how your scholarship informs librarian practice. The documentation section would then explain how you reached the decision to publish in an open access journal and include views and download counts as well as other scholarly measures such as citation count to show its potential impact for that audience .
Exercise
Complete the following exercise in your LPOL Workbook. This exercise will help you check for learning, engage with the material, and work through new ideas.
Use the 5.3.6: Craft Your Impact Story worksheets in your LPOL Workbook to answer the following prompts:
Your future impact story may start with a reflection on the larger aims of your research. Answering these questions about your goals and aims will help you craft the narrative and select the appropriate metrics to communicate your vision.
- What is it you hope to accomplish with your publications? Your answer might fall somewhere along the spectrum of responses from “I want to keep my job” to “I want to make a difference in the field,” and might include a vision not yet fully developed or realized.
- Who do you need to impact in order to achieve your goals? Who are you trying to reach with your scholarly outputs? These are your impact audiences, and they can be as broad or narrow as you like, and can overlap as well. For example, most academic librarians are both scholars and practitioners. Some broad categories include:
- Scholars, in academic librarianship and/or other disciplines or subdisciplines
- Practitioners or trade specialists, including librarians
- Policymakers
- Colleagues or peers
- Administrators
- General public/society (or subsets thereof – for example, young adults)
- Instructors
- Students
- International audiences
- For each impact audience identified, list 3-5 potential metrics or measures that would show evidence that your audience is potentially interacting with or impacted by your work. It may be useful to refer back to Sections 2 and 3 of this lesson for ideas, or come up with your own, and remember that many online interactions are relatively anonymous, so we can only take a reasonable guess at the identity behind the measure.
Once completed, the impact audiences and larger goals will form the basis of your scholarly narrative, while the metrics and measures give you some evidence to include in your documentation.
Topic 6 References
“Your Tenure Narrative.” Inside Higher Ed. Accessed June 2, 2023. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2010/11/10/your-tenure-narrative.
Craft Your Impact Story
Files for actionFiles for action Documentation submitted to an institution for consideration of a researcher maintaining a position, being promoted, and/or receiving tenure., such for tenure, reappointment, or increase in rank, often require both narrative and supporting documentation to demonstrate that you have met (or exceeded!) scholarship expectations. Which components belong in each section is highly institution-specific, so you’ll want to talk to colleagues, read institutional guidance, and review any available colleagues’ previous promotion and tenure packets for assistance.
Typically, the narrative is the place to summarize and contextualize your work — here, you’ll include some of the impact highlights and discuss the broader trajectory of your scholarship. Some questions that a narrative would help to answer include:
Regardless of whether you are pursuing tenure, discussing accomplishments can be a difficult skill for many librarians. Narratives are typically not demure or understated — they should succinctly, but compellingly, communicate your achievements and demonstrate pride in your accomplishments. The metrics and measures in this lesson are all designed to help showcase your scholarship to its fullest potential and demonstrate how your scholarship is making a difference. However, because narratives are relatively brief, you’ll want to highlight your greatest successes and explain how they fit into your overall goals and journey regarding scholarship.
While the narrative section tells your scholarship story, the documentation section offers evidence that backs up your claims. All the metrics and measures that you have gathered about your work belong in the documentation section. This portion is where you can highlight the impact of individual outputs and include higher-level metrics (such as the chart of yearly citation counts that Google Scholar produces). Often, this is also an appropriate place to contextualize the research itself — for example, you can explain why you chose to publish in a particular journal, the nature of your contribution to co-produced scholarship, or some additional qualitative impact measures or stories. There are many ways to structure the documentation portion. Again, you’ll want to pay attention to institutional expectations and norms so you can highlight your scholarship effectively.
To review the difference between narrative and documentation support, the narrative will discuss how your scholarship informs librarian practice. The documentation section would then explain how you reached the decision to publish in an open access journal and include views and download counts as well as other scholarly measures such as citation count to show its potential impact for that audience .
Exercise
Complete the following exercise in your LPOL Workbook. This exercise will help you check for learning, engage with the material, and work through new ideas.
Use the 5.3.6: Craft Your Impact Story worksheets in your LPOL Workbook to answer the following prompts:
Your future impact story may start with a reflection on the larger aims of your research. Answering these questions about your goals and aims will help you craft the narrative and select the appropriate metrics to communicate your vision.
Once completed, the impact audiences and larger goals will form the basis of your scholarly narrative, while the metrics and measures give you some evidence to include in your documentation.
Topic 6 References
“Your Tenure Narrative.” Inside Higher Ed. Accessed June 2, 2023. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2010/11/10/your-tenure-narrative.