At the March 23, 2022, Faculty Senate meeting, Associate VP Valeria Garcia, Office of Decision Support (ODS), Director Adam Caskie, Office of Decision Support (ODS), and Vice Provost Terry Chisolm, Strategic Planning, Performance, and Accountability presented on Academic Analytics (AcA). A copy of the slideshow is available here and the presentation can be viewed in the Faculty Senate on March 23, 2022 recording beginning at 1:08:10.
From the AcA website, "[w]e aggregate, curate, visualize and contextualize data on the research created by scholars and we provide powerful, user-friendly business intelligence tools to visualize and identify patterns from those data." One of the purposes of AcA data is for strategic decision-making and benchmarking.
USF began using the tool in 2009. The cost to USF for the full license is $300K/year with a 5-year contract. Chairs/directors, associate deans, deans, and Research and Innovation administrators are credentialed users and are required to attend mandatory systems and best practices training. The credentialed users list is audited annually by ODS to ensure it is up to date. One topic that was emphasized in the presentation is that the data has never been used for faculty evaluations, promotion/tenure deliberations, setting salary or merit increases, or for centrally determined internal funding.
Department- and program-level benchmarking tools are available to credentialed users and allow comparison of USF's research activity to customizable peer sets. By default, benchmarking is only provided for tenure/tenure-track and research faculty, but this can be extended to other non-tenure-track faculty.
The data is frozen in the fall (November 1) of each academic year, e.g., during 2022, the data reported is from 2021. Data includes peer-reviewed articles, with a DOI in CrossRef, and are published in English. However, faculty may contact ODS to submit other items to be included in their recorded research activity. At this time, there is not a two-way integration with Archivum, but that is being addressed for a future release so that data entry is not redundant.
USF's Faculty Insight Portal (FIP) provides access to the AcA Discovery Suite via user SSO/NetID. This suite of tools allows individual faculty to see their profile, as well as search for potential collaborators at USF and other institutions, funding opportunities, and research networks. The FIP user manual is available here.
The next steps for AcA is to:
- Create an Academic Analytics @USF Advisory Council including representation from Faculty Senate, Research & Innovation, USF Libraries, and the Deans
- Have a campus visit with AcA representatives in early fall 2022
