The remit of a core facility can vary. It can be solely to support a laboratory, group of laboratories or beyond and may be considered to be merely a support service. However, the more successful core facilities are far more than this having a great deal of input and advice into users experiments as well as possibly carrying out independent research. When considering the success of a facility, the more metrics, or measures of success, that can be derived, the better and the easier it can be to persuade funding bodies that the facility is doing what it should. The ways in which this can be measured in terms of publications include:

• Number of authorships from facility staff
• Number of papers that acknowledge the facility (this may also include an assessment of impact factor)
• Number of theses (MA, PhD etc) that acknowledge the facility.

Clearly this does require that the facility manager can keep abreast of the user-base and it is always worth encouraging all users to pass on copies of their publications to the core facility. A PubMed check also does no harm to catch the forgetful PIs!

Related links: Page Rank and Impact Factor