Valerie Vera (ORCiD 0000-0003-1453-2633) joined University of South Carolina Libraries in 2019 and currently serves as the Research Impact Librarian. She earned her Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) and a Certificate of Graduate Study in Public Health from the University of South Carolina. In her role as Research Impact Librarian, she assists faculty, staff, and students in understanding their impact at the University, within the academic community, and globally through a responsible and ethical approach to research impact assessment. She is available to support researchers with increasing their research visibility through persistent identifiers and researcher profiles, as well as assessing and interpreting their research impact using citation analysis, altmetrics, and bibliographic tools.

Selected Publications

Mohammadi, E., Cai, Y., Novin, A., & Vera, V. (2025). Who is a scientist? Gender and racial biases in Google Vision AI. AI and Ethics, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-025-00742-4

Lookingbill, V., & Wagner, T. L. (2025). The role of information and communication technologies in disclosing and reporting sexual assault among young adults: A systematic review. Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 76(1), 193-215. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24941

Roy, K., Khandelwal, V., Vera, V., Surana, H., Heckman, H., & Sheth, A. (2024). GEAR-Up: Generative AI and external knowledge-based retrieval: Upgrading scholarly article searches for systematic reviews. Proceedings of the 38^th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 38(21), 23823-23825. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v38i21.30577

Lookingbill, V. & Le, K. (2024). “There’s always a way to get around the guidelines”: Nonsuicidal self-injury and content moderation on TikTok. Social Media + Society, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241254371

Lookingbill, V., Mohammadi, E., & Cai, Y. (2023). Assessment of accuracy, user engagement, and themes of eating disorder content in social media short videos. JAMA Network Open, 6(4), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.8897

Lookingbill, V. (2022). Examining nonsuicidal self-injury content creation on TikTok through qualitative content analysis. Library and Information Science Research, 44(4), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2022.101199