I was fascinated to hear Prof Dermot Diamond’s perceptions of the library role in research. Dermot is the director of the National Centre for Sensor Research at DCU; he focused on KPIs for research and the way in which they rely solely on publishing. Some interesting points:
researchers are becoming very interested in their “H” index (I’ve noticed this here too).
we need to encourage researchers to give more consideration to how their name appears on their first research paper, as this is the start of their publishing history – women changing names, english versions of asian names etc can affect how their research is cited.
while there is an implication that multi-authored papers are less valuable in terms of counting citations, this has to be set against the current trend to encourage multi disciplinary group research and consequent group authoring.

Trinity College, Dublin