A librarian among the world’s most cited researchers?
At first glance, scientific research and academic publishing seem completely incompatible with the stereotypical image of a librarian’s work – “arranging books on shelves.” My inclusion in the list of the world’s top 100,000 (2%) most cited researchers, compiled by Elsevier and Stanford University, is undoubtedly a significant personal recognition, especially considering that the citations contributing to this result stem from a single publication. However, I believe this achievement is even more meaningful from the perspective of representing the library: the inclusion of a library representative in this list, alongside seven well-known and widely recognized VILNIUS TECH researchers, demonstrates the importance of academic libraries and proves that they can contribute to the overall university’s scientific performance, even in a global context.
At the same time, this recognition clearly illustrates that the traditional societal stereotype of a librarian is both completely outdated and misleading. It no longer reflects the reality of today’s libraries – especially academic ones – whose activities have significantly expanded. Academic libraries have evolved from providers of information, resources, and support into integral parts of universities, closely collaborating with all departments to achieve shared institutional goals. Our ability to meet the needs of both the university community — students and researchers — and the administration, while facilitating communication between these groups, is a distinctive and unique competence of libraries that offers new perspectives and significantly contributes to making the most effective and beneficial decisions for the entire university. Nevertheless, even today, we are still more involved in organizing and managing scholarly output rather than creating it.
On the other hand, I must admit that I am not a “typical” librarian – my academic background lies in an entirely different field – the exact (biomedical) sciences. Despite this, I believe I have been able to align with the priorities of my position and successfully guide the department’s activities in the right direction. This has largely been enabled by my nontraditional experience and competencies, such as doctoral studies, conducting research, and publishing results, which have helped me better understand the needs and expectations of the academic community. At the same time, this once again proves that today’s librarians need a much broader set of skills and competencies than ever before.
It is quite evident that librarians’ competencies have evolved and become increasingly aligned with research activities. However, only a few library professionals engage directly in research. So, what motivated you to take up this path?
As I mentioned, I joined the VILNIUS TECH Library from a completely different professional field. I must admit that when I started working in the Scientific Information Department, I had neither practical experience nor much understanding of what bibliographic databases were, their importance, or their use.
Nevertheless, the department’s work — whose “clients” are researchers — is inherently connected with the key bibliographic databases – Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus – which are globally used as the main tools for evaluating the quality of scholarly output. Unfortunately, at that time, there were no specialized courses or training programs on these databases, and it was not possible to gain knowledge or experience from library colleagues, as these databases were not relevant to the activities of other departments. Therefore, all the knowledge I have today about bibliographic databases was acquired independently, starting from scratch.
As I delved deeper into these databases and their applications, I realized that during my own studies and research activities, I could have performed many tasks much more efficiently and effectively if I had known about these databases earlier. These insights led me to a presumption that the amount and dissemination of information about bibliographic databases were highly insufficient. Having accumulated a sufficient background knowledge, I decided to share it with representatives of other Lithuanian academic libraries at the first National Conference of Academic Library Experiences organized by the VILNIUS TECH Library in 2018. My presentation on WoS and Scopus – their content, differences, and use – attracted great interest, clearly demonstrating that the need for information about bibliographic databases was real and relevant.
However, these databases are used not only by librarians but also by other members of the academic community – researchers, students, and university administrators – and each of these groups employs them for entirely different purposes: students search for relevant literature, researchers use them to track progress in their field and identify suitable journals for publishing results, while university management relies on them to assess the quality of research output. All these activities are closely interlinked and have a significant impact on academic careers, personal recognition, institutional prestige, and even funding opportunities. Unfortunately, gathering the necessary information required to effectively complete a specific task using these databases independently is not simple, as publicly available information is often fragmented and dispersed across various sources provided by the database owners themselves and which may be at least partly subjective. Therefore, Therefore, the most reliable way to objectively evaluate these databases and their suitability is to rely on research studies and analyses published by independent scholars.
My personal preference for clarity and structure inspired a strong desire to consolidate as much diverse, comprehensive, objective as possible, user-orientated information in one place – thus creating a summarized and accessible information resource about the most influential bibliographic databases where each user group could find the most relevant answers and choose the database best suited to their needs.
Once I began gathering the relevant information and realized its overwhelming volume, I often questioned whether the task I had set for myself was overly ambitious. However, the ultimate goal kept me from giving up, even though selecting, analyzing, and summarizing the relevant information took several years.
Libraries use many different channels to share information. Why, in this case, they were not suitable and you choose to publish a scientific article instead?
Once the information was prepared, I needed to decide which dissemination channel would best serve in achieving another key goal – to ensure the widest possible visibility and accessibility of the prepared information so that anyone interested could benefit from it. Bibliographic databases are relevant to the whole global academic community, which is practically impossible to fully reach through traditional local channels. Therefore, to ensure global dissemination, I decided to use the most established and internationally recognized form of academic communication – publication in a scientific journal. To further enhance visibility and guarantee unrestricted access, the open access publishing model was chosen.
It has now been several years since the article was published. Do you think it is possible to assess whether the original goals have been achieved?
I tend to be quite self-critical, so initially I had some doubts on whether I had correctly assessed the academic community’s needs. However, the relevance of the information became evident already at the publishing stage, as the article received highly positive peer-reviewers’ evaluations. Moreover, even the journal’s editorial board recognized the article’s significance and potential, offering to publish it free-of-charge (waiving the APC fee) and designating it as a high-potential feature paper. The article’s relevance was quickly confirmed by the rapid increase in readership and citations. About a year after publishing, its usage metrics reached levels that caught the attention of Elsevier – the prestigious global publisher and owner of one of the described databases (Scopus) – which recognized the article’s importance to the academic community by presenting the “Research Library Impact Award” at the conference „Towards Future Research Impact in Lithuania“.
The article’s popularity and usage have continued to grow rapidly – nearly doubling in the past year alone. The sustained and growing readership remains personally meaningful to me also for another reason – it confirms that the academic community recognizes it as a reliable and valuable source of information, validating the time and effort devoted to its preparation.
