The MPACT Project
The MPACT Project is an ongoing project devoted to defining and assessing
Mentoring as a scholarly activity. Based at the School of Information and Library
Science's Interaction Design Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, the project's current focus is collecting data on dissertations and
dissertation committee service. We invite participation of others to augment the
MPACT database and develop new MPACT metrics and theory.
Publications
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Gary Marchionini, Paul Solomon, Cheryl Davis and Terrell Russell. Information and library science MPACT: A preliminary analysis. Library & Information Science Research, Volume 28, Issue 4, Winter 2006, Pages 480-500. Winner of the 2007 ALA Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research.
Abstract: Dissertation advising is an important form of mentoring. To investigate the impact of dissertation advising over time, advisor and committee member names were collected for 2400 dissertations completed over a 40-year period (1964-2004) in 32 North American information and library science schools. Several mentoring impact metrics are reported for a subset of the data, including the number of dissertations advised, the number of dissertation committees served on, the ratio of advising to committee membership, and the fractional "mpact" that weights advising and committee membership. The subset consists of data for six schools that produced at least three dozen dissertations and for which complete data is available. The data and resulting "mpact" metrics offer new ways to assess faculty impact and to investigate the nature and growth of a field.
Related/Derivative Work
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Yong-Mi Kim. A Preliminary Social Network Analysis of MPACT. Poster. ASIS&T 2007. Milwaukee, WI.
Abstract:A preliminary social network analysis of the MPACT dataset is presented. The current MPACT measures only take into account direct advising or committee relationships. But a mentor may also have indirect impact in the productivity of a mentor's direct mentees. Proximity prestige is examined as one such measure. Visualization of mentoring networks can also uncover different facets of mentoring impact. This short paper presents work currently in progress.
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