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
• Patents
• Protocols
• Educational or curricular materials
• Software
• Peer review or editorial work

Search for citations by author:

• On the Web of Science Core Collection homepage, click AUTHORS 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 citations by author

• Click the Authors tab on the Scopus homepage.
• Enter the author's name and affiliation.
• A list of authors who meet your search criteria will be displayed.  Your name may appear more than once.  To ensure that all author results are displayed, check Show profile matches with one document box at the top of the page.

Create citation report:

• Click the boxes next to correct author profile(s).
• Click View citation overview link at the top of the results.

Author results page in Scopus

Export citation report to Excel:

• Click Export at the top of the Citation overview page.

Citation overview page in Scopus

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

It can be difficult to capture all the publications by one researcher due to authors publishing under multiple variations of the same name, common names, name changes, and different cultural conventions in naming.

Author identifiers are unique identifiers that allow you to distinguish yourself from other researchers, and unambiguously associate yourself with your work.