Research impact

Measuring the impact of your research is becoming more important, especially when applying for a grant or even a new position.

How to measure your research impact

Citation analysis is a widely accepted measure of the impact of your research. The most commonly used metrics are:

  • Citation count — providing the number of times your publications have been cited.
  • H-index — a number indicating the the quality and quantity of your research. A researcher with an index of 5 has published 5 papers each of which has been cited by others at least 5 times.

Tools to measure research impact

The following tools can be used to determine the number of times a publication has been cited:

  • Web of Science is the most well-known tool for determining the number of times a publication has been cited.
  • Scopus is the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources.
  • ScienceDirect allows researchers to see how many citations an individual article has accrued and the articles citing it.
  • Google Scholar indexes citations which can then be analysed using the free program, Publish or Perish.
  • Publish or Perish is a free program that retrieves citations from Google Scholar and allows users to calculate:
    • total number of papers
    • total number of citations
    • average number of citations per paper
    • average number of citations per author
    • average number of papers per author
    • average number of citations per year
    • Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
    • Egghe's g-index
    • the contemporary h-index
    • the age-weighted citation rate
    • two variations of individual h-indices
    • an analysis of the number of authors per paper.

Journal impact

This is a measure of the frequency with which an article in a journal has been cited in a particular period.

Impact factors can be used to:

  • identify journals in which to publish
  • identify journals relevant to your research
  • confirm the status of journals in which you have published.

JCR is the only source of citation data on journals, and includes virtually all specialties in the areas of science, technology and social sciences. However, less than 10,000 journals are covered so many journals do not have an impact factor.

Other resources available with journal evaluations are: