Research Guides: Impact of Research and Scholarly Works: Home

What is impact?

Most often people correlate scholarly impact with impact factor; however, this is only one measure which refers to a journal's impact as defined by one source. There are many ways to show impact - article citations, h-index, journal prestige, article downloads, social media presence, news mentions, and more. DORA and Leiden Manifesto are two initiatives trying to make this point and get promotion and tenure committees to rethink what they want to see in the quality markers of articles and scholars.This guide will introduce you to these varied options.

Metrics Toolkit
Provides great overviews of a variety of metrics and where to find them.
Leiden Manifesto for Research
10 principles to guide research evaluation
DORA: San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
A declaration initiated by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals, recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research are evaluated.

Workshop Materials

Measuring Scholarly Impact

This guide will help you determine the impact of a scholarly work, journal, or researcher. Be aware that results may be tricky to locate and ultimately subjective.

Bibliometrics: The overall name for the use of statistical methods in the analysis of a body of literature to reveal the historical development of subject fields and patterns of authorship, publication, and use. See bibliometric approaches below.

Citation Anaysis (Article Impact): Can help you determine how often something has been cited and who has cited whom.

Journal Rankings (Journal Impact): Can reveal a journal's influence by looking at how often a journal's articles have been cited.

h-Index (Researcher Impact): Determines the success of a particular researcher by measuring the number of works they publish and the number of times their works are cited.

Altmetrics or “alternative metrics”: Includes information such as number of downloads and page views from a publisher, views in repositories or online reference managers, or the amount of discussion generated in venues such as social media or blogs.

Research Impact Metrics Quick Reference 2016
From Elsevier.

Telling Impact Stories

Best Bets

Article Impact:

Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Index of scholarly materials with comprehensive coverage of the sciences and socials sciences with some coverage of the arts and humanities. Includes citations and citation tracking for articles, journals, proceedings, conference papers, and more and is pulled from various collections. Includes links to Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

Journal Impact:

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) This link opens in a new window
Find impact factor and citations of thousands of journals in the sciences and social sciences. Results can be used to determine journals which are most cited and may be more influential in a discipline.

h-Index:

Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Create a profile that showcases your papers and the citations they’ve received. It automatically searches for citations of your article and calculates your h-index. No Google account? Create a Google account. Already have a Google account? Go to Google Scholar, click on My citations, and Sign in.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Provides the h-index of a researcher. First, conduct an author search, then click on the "Create Citation Report" link.

Altmetrics:

Altmetric
Generate a metric for journal articles. A variety of data are used to create an altmetrics score, including social media, multi-media, mainstream media mentions, blogs, Mendeley and more. Most of the services are not free.

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