LibGuides: Research and Scholarship: Research Impact

Research Impact & Bibliometrics

Image source: Dasapta Erwin Irawan [CC0]

Bibliometrics is the quantitative analysis of publications. More and more, tools within this field are being used to assess the impact of scholarly articles, journals, an individual researcher, or even an institution. Therefore, it is essential that faculty members become familiar with different tools and how they evaluate scholarly works. Below are resources explaining bibliometrics in more detail, and links to some of the tools used in the analysis.

Journal Ranking

Journal ranking is a quantitative analysis of journals. Though controversial, it is considered a traditional method in academia that offers a picture of the most influential journals in a given discipline. There are different ways to calculate the impact factors of journals, such as the JIF (Web of Science), SJR (Scopus), Eigenfactor, and more. Additionally, there are databases that have created their own metrics limited to their journal collection, such as Scopus.

CWTS Journal Indicators
Google Scholar Metrics h5-index is the h-index for articles published in the last 5 complete years. It is the largest number h such that h articles published in 2014-2018 have at least h citations each.
Scilit Scientific Literature The name Scilit uses components of the words “scientific” and “literature”. This database of scholarly works is developed and maintained by the open access publisher MDPI.
SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) You can search for the impact factor of the journals in your discipline. The ranking of the journals is based on the information form Scopus.
Scopus Journal Analyzer 10 titles of journals can be compared with each other based on a set of varieties.

Journal Metrics explained
From Wiley's Authors Services

H-Index (Author's impact)

The h-index (Hirsch index) is an author-level metric based on a person’s number of papers and citation number. It is a combined measure of both productivity and impact. Note: Like every other bibliometrics tool, the h-index has its own limitations and should be used with caution. For example, the h-index does not count in the average number of citations in different disciplines nor is it a proper tool for measuring the impact of early-career researchers.

Your h-index is based on a list of your publications ranked in descending order by the times cited count. The value of h is equal to the number of papers (N) in the list that have N or more citations. You can find your h-index in the tools below.

Author citation count with Scopus
Go to Scopus via Library Databases; select Author search tab; Author dashboard describes number of citations and author h-index.
Google Scholar
Create a Google Scholar profile for free; add your publications to its dashboard via Touro Scholar to find the number of citations and your h-index.
Publish or Perish Software that retrieves and analyzes academic citations.

Altmetrics or Alternative Metrics

Altmetrics are statistical tools that use a range of social media sources to calculate the influence of scholarly literature. They work as a complement to more traditional methods of analysis.

PlumX
Touro Scholar uses PlumX as an Almetric tool to show the research impact by using these categories of metrics: usage, captures, mentions, social media, and citations.
PLoS The Public Library of Science (PLoS) has individual article metrics under each article. Once you select an article, you will see an option to view Metrics.

How to improve your impact

Always use your same name version consistently throughout your career
Use a standardized institutional affiliation and address
Collaborate with researchers in other institutions
Deposit your publication in our institutional repository, Touro Scholar which is accessible to the world
Register for an ORCID to improve your visibility in the databases worldwide. See tutorial here.
Present preliminary research findings at meetings and conferences
Consider communicating information about your research via Twitter, blogs or other social media channels

(Adapted from Michelle Dalton--UCD library)