Responsible Research Assessment · DORA-aligned · in development

The SoTL Index open · described, not ranked

A reading of teaching scholarship — described, never ranked.

◇ Part of NTLSN's Responsible Research Assessment hub →

Most metrics reward research. This one reads the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning — and refuses to score it. Enter an ORCID, or a university, and it describes what the open record shows: counts, open-access shares, the actual venues, the years — with, beside every fact, what the instrument cannot see. Built from open OpenAlex data, in your browser. A reflection tool, never a ranking of people — now by construction, not just by claim.

Built on DORA, by design The h-index and journal quartiles are exactly what DORA argues against — pure citation counts, blind to field (so teaching scholars always look "low" next to lab scientists) and blind to everything teaching scholarship actually produces. The SoTL Index answers that: it field-normalises citation context, it values openness and teaching focus over journal prestige, and it issues no score, no band and no ranking at all — it describes a body of scholarly work in facts, and names beside each fact what it cannot see. It measures nothing about a person's worth or their teaching, which no bibliographic tool can see.
Don't know it? Find any researcher at orcid.org.  ·  See an example →
Reading open records…

What the record shows — beside what it cannot see

The facts (no ranks)

How it is built — and what it gets wrong Public outputs are read from OpenAlex (open bibliographic data) via an ORCID or institution. This instrument describes; it does not rank. There is no score, no 0–100, no 1–7 band, no composite and no weighting anywhere in it — those were removed on purpose, because a coloured bar proportional to a hidden number is still a ranking, and ranking teaching scholars is the exact move this tool exists to refuse. What it shows are facts about a corpus: counts, open-access shares stated as "X of Y", the actual venue names, active years, and the primary field as context. What it actively gets wrong (not just what it misses): it under-reads education and SoTL citations against research baselines; it cannot see books, chapters, OERs, non-DOI, practitioner, community-engaged or Indigenous scholarship, and reads their absence as silence; it can mis-tag an interdisciplinary or emerging venue as non-SoTL; it mistakes a paywall (a publisher or APC barrier) for a scholar's choice; and it cannot see teaching itself, mentoring, curriculum, service or the students. These are active distortions the instrument introduces, disclosed beside every fact it prints — not a footnote. Grounded in Boyer's scholarship of teaching, Glassick's standards and DORA. An open, in-development instrument for reflection — not SCImago, Scopus or Clarivate; not a measure of a person's worth or their teaching; and explicitly not a tool for ranking individuals. The recognised-venue taxonomy is curated openly and is contestable (above). NTLSN is independent of OpenAlex and all metric providers. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is stored.

◇ AI field guide — notice the em-dashes (—)? A field-normalised tell. AI can’t quit them — now neither can your eye.