a2ru Academic Metrics Working Group
The a2ru Academic Metrics Working Group studies how universities document, evaluate, and communicate arts-based, creative, interdisciplinary, and applied research. We are developing tools and frameworks that move beyond simple output counts toward pathways of evidence, milestones, collaboration, and impact.
The group is organized around research questions, not standing subcommittees.
How can research universities represent the pathways, milestones, collaborations, and forms of impact associated with creative and interdisciplinary scholarship without reducing that work to conventional publication-equivalency metrics?
Read the research agenda
Early conclusions from a 15-response leadership survey. Each card names its source. Survey claims stay labeled preliminary.
Performances, exhibitions, applied work, and other creative activity are described as difficult or impossible to represent in some institutional analytics systems.
15 responses. Almost exclusively R1 institutions. Average institution size approximately 40,000 students. Respondents include professors, deans, associate deans, chairs/heads, and academic professionals.
The same platform may support annual review at one institution, benchmarking at another, and institutional reporting at another.
15 responses. Almost exclusively R1 institutions. Average institution size approximately 40,000 students. Respondents include professors, deans, associate deans, chairs/heads, and academic professionals.
Respondents describe platforms that support some administrative functions while remaining poor representations of creative research.
15 responses. Almost exclusively R1 institutions. Average institution size approximately 40,000 students. Respondents include professors, deans, associate deans, chairs/heads, and academic professionals.
Current practices often place an activity system next to a CV, a narrative, supplemental evidence, and committee judgment.
Survey context: 15 preliminary responses, almost exclusively R1. Interview context: one anonymized institutional account of Elements.
Activity, evidence, milestone, audience, and impact. The point is to show relationships, not to score the work.
One possible reading
Pathways branch. This diagram does not rank them.
The sequence below is an example — research, collaboration, prototype, public engagement, adoption, community impact. Other work begins in performance, teaching, or community partnership and never passes through these stages in this order.
1
Research
2
Collaboration
3
Prototyping
4
Public engagement
5
Adoption
6
Community impact
| Order in this example | Stage | What it marks |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Research | Reading, archival work, fieldwork, or material investigation. |
| 2 | Collaboration | Partners, students, or other disciplines join the work. |
| 3 | Prototyping | A version made to be tried, not a final equivalent of a publication. |
| 4 | Public engagement | People outside the research team encounter the work. |
| 5 | Adoption | Someone else takes up a method, work, or recommendation. |
| 6 | Community impact | A community describes a change that matters locally. |
Preliminary · 15 responses
A preliminary account of how responding institutions use faculty activity systems, and where creative work goes missing.
First diagram
A model for describing activity, evidence, milestones, audiences, and impact without a universal score.
In progress
How campuses use Academic Analytics, Elements, Watermark, and other systems — and what those uses make visible.
Planned
Practical guides for faculty, chairs, and faculty-affairs staff. Tools will be published when they can be used on their own.
The group meets every second Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. EST / noon PST. Matthew S. Nolan chairs it. Membership is an a2ru member benefit, and the public directory lists 19 people.
The preliminary Leadership Survey is the current public evidence: 15 responses, almost all from large research universities. Findings drawn from it are labeled preliminary. Meeting summaries will be added when a synthesis can say what changed.
Read the findingsa2ru member institutions can join the Working Group, propose projects, and contribute cases.
Non-members may attend up to two meetings. After that, participation continues through an a2ru membership.
Faculty, chairs, and institutional research staff can read findings and, later, download tools without joining.