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Publication Metrics: Getting Started

"Research impact is the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy. It embraces all the diverse ways that research-related skills benefit individuals, organisations and nations."   - Research Councils UK (RCUK)

Why is it important?
It is important that researchers know their impact as it can help: support applications for tenure or promotion; justify requests for grants and other funding; quantify, and determine how their research is being used; identify other researchers or institutions that are using their work; and identify other researchers, and potential collaborators, in their field.

We can help you...

  • determine a specific journal's impact
  • learn the overall impact of your work
  • pull together an analysis of you or your department's impact based on citations
  • track who mentions your work in non-scholarly arenas
  • figure out ways to enhance the reach of your research

Determining a Journal's Impact

Journal Metrics, such as Impact Factor, can help track citation patterns within journals and determine which journals are highly-cited.

Impact Factor (IF) is perhaps the best known Journal Metric. IF is the average number of times, in the past two years, that articles from a journal have been cited in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

Impact Factor is just one metric used to measure a journal's impact. Additional metrics should be considered.

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What is...?

The impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The JCR also lists journals and their impact factors and ranking in the context of their specific field(s).

Click here to walk through the steps to finding your h-index!



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