Building a Scholar Tracker Dashboard: Reporting on CTSA trainee career progression in a scalable way (Digital Science sponsor session)

Tracking scholars is an inherently difficult task - it can quickly become unmanageable to track their productivity and impact once they leave an institution, such as after completing a PhD or training program. Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Hubs are required to report to the NIH annually on their trainees (e.g. K12 Mentored Career Development Award) for 10 years post-program. To streamline efforts, the CTSC of Northern Ohio, the Georgia CTSA, and Digital Science came together to create a prototype LookerStudio dashboard using Dimensions and Altmetric data. Our goals included creating a low maintenance, automated process and dashboard ready to socialize with CTSA Hubs facing similar challenges.

Using traditional bibliometrics and altmetrics, the dashboard allows evaluators to quickly identify current and past CTSA hub trainees who 1) are highly cited, 2) have external funding, 3) are impacting policy and clinical guidelines, and 4) are publishing in diverse subject areas and demonstrating growth post-program. We will cover how we used a bibliometric data source, in this case Dimensions and Altmetric on Google BigQuery, and the publicly available Looker Studio to construct a practical, intuitive, and easily shareable dashboard. The goal was to have a replicable dashboard that CTSA Hubs and similar programs could use for the long-term tracking of researcher activities and impact.

Attendees will leave with a better understanding of how to collect and visualize publication and grant data, while introducing traditional and alternative metrics to better understand the career progression of their researchers.