LibGuides: Publishing Your Scholarly Article: Measuring the Impact of Your Research

Now that you're a published author ....

Evaluating Your Impact

Once your journal article has been published you may wish to evaluate how much impact your article has had on the research community.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

No one database is comprehensive.
No one database covers all journals.
No one database includes all publication formats.
Publication dates affect your results.
Results can be misleading.
All impact measures are controversial.

How much have others used my work?

Citation Analysis

One measure of impact is to determine how much others have used your work to advance research in your field of inquiry. There are several indices and databases which provide this type of citation analysis.

Google Scholar
Cited reference searching is possible in Google Scholar:
1. Search for your name in the author box of the "Advanced Google Scholar Search"
2. Look for "Cited by" below each result for the number of citations. Click this link to see who is citing the work.
Web of Science
Web of Science was one of the first databases to offer "cited reference" searching and is the most widely known. It includes the Science, Social Sciences, and Arts & Humanities citation indexes.
h - index
The h-index is the number n of a researcher's papers that have been cited by other papers at least n times. The higher the number the more important the scientist.

Altmetrics

Alternative metrics or 'altmetrics' are ways to measure the impact of research beyond traditional citation sources like articles and books. Altmetrics look for the reach of a research article in places like social media, policy documents, news stories, data sets, and more.

Impact Story
ImpactStory aggregates altmetrics measures from tweets, articles, datasets, blog posts, and more.
Altmetric Bookmarklet
The Altmetric company charges for use of their full product, but you can install this bookmarklet to get stats on individual papers.