As part of University of Idaho”s new planning strategy, Brad Fenwick, vice president of Global Strategic Alliances with Elsevier, conducted a study on the university”s success in regards to writing research papers.
The purpose of the study was to find the university”s strong points, where it is not doing as well and how it can use the data to improve.
Fenwick said what worked in the past for universities will not meet tomorrow”s education and science needs. He said it is a matter of economics, hard times and the belief campus sustainability is down.
“Regardless of university tier, everyone is in the same boat,” Fenwick said.
Now, Fenwick said campuses have to be innovative. Using an example from the movie “Moneyball,” where the characters use data to build the best baseball team, Fenwick emphasized the importance of data to make a school even better.
He said schools have to make bets and decide the best place to put their money in order to get the most out of it. The data that Elsevier brings in, Fenwick said, allows schools to make decisions that are good bets.
At UI, Fenwick said he found the interdisciplinary papers to be excellent, with those papers receiving five times more citations than the average. He said the university should build on this, as those interdisciplinary papers make up only a small portion of the papers produced by UI. Fenwick also found that UI is the top ranked school in research papers on fish, fire and potatoes. Fenwick said UI should capitalize on that and make sure people – especially prospective students – know about it.
Fenwick encouraged collaboration and it will often increase the quality of the paper for both parties.
Fenwick said he sees lot of potential at UI, though it is “research constrained.”
While the campus needs a bit of help to succeed, Fenwick said there are lots of options UI can pursue to be even better.
Elsevier has also created a unique method of organizing papers – they call it Fingerprinting.
Instead of traditional keyword and title searches, Fingerprinting uses title and abstract concepts from papers. This means the search information is more appropriate and shows who the writer is as a scholar more accurately than other methods.
Elsevier has also tried to create more accurate comparisons between schools, Fenwick said.
Although he is now with Elsevier, Fenwick was previously a professor of pathology and microbiology.
“I am most comfortable in the world on a university campus,” Fenwick said.
Fenwick said Elsevier depends on the health of higher education and they are dedicated to helping schools like UI reach their full potential. He said their goal is to enable research, do research and share research.
Katie Colson can be reached at [email protected]