How do scholars measure their impact on the world?

Through most of the 20th century, it was through publishing in closed-access, for-profit journals and tracking the citations of those publications in indices.  Now, some people are re-thinking those as the most useful ways to measure a scholar’s influence on the world.  In the era of the web, impact can also be measured in terms of links, downloads, views, usage, and re-mixes.  Some are calling these new ways of assessing scholarly impact “altmetrics” and you can read more here and here. We’ll be writing more about this on our blog soon.

Beyond the question of how academics measure their influence on other academics, JustPublics@365 is also concerned with the impact of scholarly work on issue of social injustice, what we call “social justice impressions.” Opening a national discussion of how to transform the academy by measuring the social justice impressions is a crucial goal of this initiative.