Assessing and tracing the outcomes and impact of research infrastructures

A growing emphasis on open science and reproducibility is changing how authors cite and acknowledge "research infrastructures" -- entities that are used as inputs to or as underlying foundations for scholarly research, including data sets, software packages, computational models, observational platforms, and computing facilities.

At the same time, stakeholder interest in quantitative understanding of impact is spurring increased collection and analysis of metrics related to use of research infrastructures. This article reviews work spanning several decades on tracing and assessing the outcomes and impacts from these kinds of research infrastructures. We discuss how research infrastructures are identified and referenced by scholars in the research literature and how those references are being collected and analyzed for the purposes of evaluating impact.