The Impact of Natural History Collections in Scientific Research: Nobel Prize winners in the making?

Natural history museums provide a diverse range of services from education to research that are made possible by their rich collections of specimens. Despite their many roles, museums are almost entirely assessed on just their fiscal attributes and very little work has been undertaken to assess the impact that museums have in scientific research. This project created a league table showing the impact of natural history museums in research using four different metrics; the number of papers citing a museum’s specimens, the h-index of a museum, the number of sequences on GenBank that derive from a museum’s specimens and the number of records a museum stores on GBIF. It was found that a total of eight museums had an impact in research equivalent to the average Noble Prize winner. A museum’s impact in scientific literature and in the field of genomics increased with the number of specimens held in the collection but the collection size did not explain variation in the number of records stored on GBIF. This may reflect the historic importance and resources available to large museums as well as the process of sharing data online being a relatively new and inexpensive phenomenon. This league table could be used to inform natural history museums of their strengths and weaknesses in various areas of research. By identifying that some natural history collections have an impact equivalent to that of our most esteemed researchers, hopefully further studies will be encouraged to expand upon the idea of research impact metrics for museums.