Measuring Research Impact

You may be asked to demonstrate the impact of your work for the purposes of grant applications, progress reports and renewals, or performance reviews, tenure, and promotion.  Traditionally, this has meant providing your number of publications, and the number of citations that those publications have received.

You can capture citation information with:

A citation report

• Comprehensive list of publications and the number of times those publications have been cited
• Create in Web of Science or Scopus
• Use Essential Science Indicators to evaluate how your citation profile compares to others in your field

The h-Index

• The number of papers (h) that have received h or more citations
• An h-index of 10 means that an author has 10 articles that have each received 10 or more citations
• Measure of the cumulative impact of an author's publications
• Attempt to measure quantity (number of publications) and quality (number of citations received)
• Find in Web of Science, Scopus or Google Scholar

Think beyond peer-reviewed publications

The peer-reviewed article is no longer the only acceptable measure of a researcher's contribution to science.  When asked to demonstrate the impact of your research, consider including:

• Conference abstracts, posters or other presentations
• Data sets
• Audio or video productions
• Policy/industry papers and reports
• Patents
• Protocols
• Educational or curricular materials
• Software
• Peer review or editorial work

Search for author:

• On the Web of Science Core Collection homepage, click RESEARCHERS to search the author database.
• Enter author's name and click Search. 
• Select the appropriate entry to view the author profile.
• Click View citation report in the Publications section.

Search for author

• Click the Authors tab on the Scopus homepage.
• Enter the author's name and affiliation.
• Check off all authors that match

• Click Citation overview link at the top of the results.

Essential Science Indicators can answer questions like:

• Who are the most-cited authors in my field?
• What journals publish the top papers in my field?
• What is the average number of citations per article in my field?
• What is the minimum number of citations that my article needs to receive to be in the 10% percentile in my field?

In Publons, you can:

• Control what information is displayed on your public profile, such as publisher, journal, article title and review content
• Generate a printable version of your peer review and editorial history, which can be added to your CV or grant applications
• Compare your peer review and editorial contributions to others in your discipline or at your institution

Author identifiers are unique numbers assigned to researchers to distinguish and disambiguate their work from others with similar names and due to name changes and inconsistencies. 

Employing author identifiers often yields more comprehensive assessments of research impact by capturing data that may have been lost to multiple variations of the same name, common names, name changes, and different cultural conventions in naming.