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Process: Measure Impact

Measure Impact

Decorative chess piece

Use this guide to find information about how to measure the impact of your scholarly research. These tools are useful to: quantitatively evaluate your academic productivity and the impact of your work on the discipline; find the top tier journals in the field; demonstrate the impact of your research to funders and employers; find top researchers within a given field.

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Establish Your Research Identity

Create and establish your researcher identity by creating unique profiles that disambiguate yourself from others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Journal Impact

Measure a journal's impact to select venues for publishing your work or help to evaluate value and impact of scholarship. The impact factor (IF) is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times it's articles are cited.

Citation Analysis

Identify the number of times other authors have cited a work using the tools listed here. 

Book Impact

Identify the number of libraries that own a specific book title as an indicator of quantity worldwide. Identify who has cited the title as an indicator of impact and influence. Locate reviews and critiques.

Data Impact

Identify citation counts, downloads and re-use of data.

Persistent Identifiers

Traditional Metrics

H-Index

H-Index = number of papers (h) with a citation number ≥ h.  

Example: a research with an H-Index of 24 has 24 papers cited at least 24 times.  

  • Allows for direct comparisons within disciplines.
  • Measures quantity and impact using a single value.
  • Poor measure for early career researchers.
  • Limited to articles indexed in Web of Science.

Wikipedia article on H-Index.

Tools for measuring H-Index:


G-Index

Developed in 2006, Leo Egghe proposed the G-Index in his paper "Theory and Practice of the G-Index". G-Index builds on and improves the H-Index. It is not as widely accepted as the H-Index. Wikipedia article on G-Index.

 


i10-Index

Created by Google Scholar and used in Google's My Citations feature. 

i10-Index = the number of publications with at least 10 citations.  


Altmetrics

Altmetrics is a quantitative measure of the quality and quantity of attention that a scholarly work is receiving through social media, citations, and article downloads.