Research Guides: Research and Publishing: Research Impact

Measuring Research Impact

Research outputs such as journal articles, conference papers and other scholarly publications are the primary means of communicating the results of academic enquiry. Metrics are increasingly being used to measure the research impact or research influence of an individual researcher or group.

Reference:

University of Queensland Library. Research metrics. https://web.library.uq.edu.au/library-services/services-researchers/metrics (Accessed 24 April 2020)

Research Impact Module by American University of Sharjah

Research Impact Module by American University of Sharjah
In this module, you will be introduced to what the different types of research impact are, how to plan for impact, and why you should want it.
The 30-Day Impact Challenge
This is a free e-book written by Stacy Konkiel on what you can do to increase your research impact ranging from profile pages, social media, to open access. The Research Impact Module is adapted from this book.

Databases for Citation Analysis

Scopus This link opens in a new window
Scopus is an important cross-disciplinary abstract & citation database of research literature. Use Scopus to search for article level citation metrics like total cites or FWCI as well as a list of sources indexed in Scopus and their respective Journal level metrics like Citescore, SJR, and SNIP.

SMU Libraries has access to Scopus API that can be used for text and data mining. More info here.

SciVal
SciVal can be used to view research performance and to benchmark with peers and peer institutions, using a range of metrics. You need to register for an account to use SciVal. The data for the metrics in SciVal comes from Scopus.

Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Use this database to identify highly cited articles in a subject area and authors who cite a specific article. Use it to search for articles using keyword and even by institution name.
Web of Science includes Social Sciences Citation Index (from 1900), Science Citation Index (from 1965), Arts & Humanities Citation Index (from 2008), and Book Citation Index (2005-2018)

SMU Libraries has access to Web of Science API Lite. More info here.

Altmetrics

Altmetric.com
Altmetric tracks what people are saying about papers online on behalf of authors, libraries and institutions. Altmetric collects the relevant discussions around each article from Twitter, Facebook, science blogs, mainstream news outlets and others.
Impactstory
Impactstory is an open-source, web-based tool that helps researchers explore and share the diverse impacts of all their research products—from traditional ones like journal articles, to emerging products like blog posts, datasets, and software. It is now free and you sign up using your Twitter account.
PlumX
A service that captures social media and news mentions, usage in selected databases and sources, and export saves in some reference management services. You can view PlumX metrics at the record page in Scopus and InK.

Quality Frameworks

Excellence in Research for Australia
Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) is Australia’s national research evaluation framework. ERA identifies and promotes excellence across the full spectrum of research activity in Australia’s higher education institutions. It is tasked with identifying excellence in research, by comparing Australia's university research effort against international benchmarks, creating incentives to improve the quality of research and identifying emerging research areas and opportunities for further development.
Snowball Metrics
Snowball Metrics, proposed by research-intensive universities around the globe, are a set of metrics to compare universities performance with methodologies that are robustly and clearly defined.