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Scholarly Communication Guide: Research Impact

This guide provides information on the support services available at the library to help with all stages of your research, from planning your research, to measuring the impact of your research.

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Article Impact - Journalism ...

"Research impact" refers to the influence of a scholar's work. Tools to track and measure impact are designed to help researchers understand how their work is being used and how it fits into the scholarship of their field overall. A scholar might ask, for example:

  • How widely is my work being cited in other scholarly publications?
  • How widely is my work being read?
  • Who is reading and using my work? What subsequent scholarship have I influenced?
  • How do articles that I published in a particular journal compare to articles that I published elsewhere?
  • What influence does my work have outside of academia?

Understanding the impact of one's research can help scholars build tenure and promotion cases, select publication outlets for future work, and identify potential collaborators.

 

Journal impact metrics, or Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) attempt to quantify the importance of a particular journal in its field, usually via an algorithm that considers the number of articles published per year and the number of citations to those published in that journal. They are often used to help determine where to publish. Journals with high-impact metrics are often considered more prestigious. 

Key indicators include:

  1. Journal Impact Factor (JIF) published by Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters).

  2. SCIMago Journal Rank (SJR) published by SCIMago and Elsevier using data from Scopus.

  3. CiteScore published by Elsevier using data from Scopus (introduced in late 2016).

CiteScore Metrics

Derived from the Scopus database, CiteScore is a family of eight journal-level indicators that offer complementary views to analyze the publication influence of journals of interest. CiteScore metrics are available for 25,300 journals as of June 2020.

Google Scholar Metrics provides a list of the top 100 journals in specific subject fields. The journal rankings are determined with Google's 5-year h-index metric. You can select a specific subject field by clicking on the categories drop-down menu.

The author's impact score is traditionally measured by using the number of academic publications they have authored and the number of times other researchers have cited the author's publications. Different algorithms have been created to calculate an author's impact 'score' using the number of publications and the number of citations. Below are a few metrics you may encounter. Remember that author impact measurements have limitations and should be used carefully.

Note: Different databases will have different metrics scores depending on what articles (citations) they can access.

  • h-index (most widely used)
    • The h-index is the number of papers (h) that received h or more citations. An h index of 3 means that an author has 3 papers that each received at least 3 citations. One common criticism of h-index is that it is not an accurate measure for early-career researchers.
  • g-index
    • This algorithm was proposed in 2006 as an alternative to giving more weight to highly cited papers, but it has not been widely accepted.
  • i10-index
    • This algorithm is only used in Google Scholar and counts the number of publications with at least 10 citations.

Citation Analysis

Citation counts measure the impact of a particular publication or an individual author by counting the number of times either has been cited in other works. This analysis of a particular author's work is one of the components used to evaluate the quality of that individual's scholarly output and the impact he or she is having upon a particular discipline. Although such counting sounds relatively straightforward, it is complicated by the fact that there is no single citation analysis source that covers all publications and their cited references.

Bibliometrics

Bibliometrics is a term used to describe statistics that measure usage of research publications based on citation counts and patterns. Data can be collected at the level of an article, a journal title, or at the level of an author.

There are different bibliometrics that include the following: 

Publication Bibliometrics

Journal Bibliometrics

Author bibliometrics

Altmetrics