Subject Guides: Publishing: Measuring Impact

Researcher Impact

H-Index

The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar. It is calculated using this formula: Number of papers (h) that have received at least h citations.

Resources for finding an h-index:

Web of Science This link opens in a new window Search for the name of the author in the top search box, and then click on Citation Report on the right hand corner of the results page.
Scopus This link opens in a new window Scopus is an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature including scientific journals, books, and conference proceedings. Scopus provides a comprehensive overview of worldwide research output in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities, along with tools to track, analyze, and visualize research.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window Create a profile of all your articles captured in Google Scholar. Once complete, this will show all the times the articles have been cited by other documents in Google Scholar and your h-index will be provided.

Harzing’s Publish or Perish (POP) After searching by your name, your h-index will appear at the top of the tool. Note: This tool must be downloaded to use.

Author Identifiers

Author Identifiers make the process of measuring author impact easier by quickly and correctly identifying a researchers' publications.

ORCID Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.
ResearcherID Web of Science provides a unique author identifier called a ResearcherID that allows you to link your research outputs as indexed in Thomson Reuters' databases.
Google Scholar Profile By creating a Google Scholar profile, you can track citations of your work and see who is citing it.
ImpactStory Impactstory is a tool that helps scientists 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.

Alternative Metrics (Altmetrics)

Alternative metrics (altmetrics) complement traditional citation-based measures. Alternative metrics show how many times a research output has been shared, mentioned or downloaded from online sources such as social media sites, blogs, mainstream media, and reference managers.

Track alternative metrics using these resources:

Dimensions This link opens in a new window Dimensions provides up-to-the minute online attention data via Altmetric, showing you how often publications and clinical trials are discussed around the world.

Altmetric Bookmarklet Track alternative metrics (altmetrics) for your article. If your article has a digital object identifier (DOI), use this tool to see how your article is being shared on social media websites.
Paperbuzz Paperbuzz shows how often a scholarly article was mentioned around the web. Note: the article must have a DOI.

Journal Impact

One commonly used impact metric for journals is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF or IF) score. It is an average of the number of times articles published in a particular journal have been cited in the two previous years.

Journal Citation Reports This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive tool for finding impact factors for journals.

Other journal ranking tools include:

Eigenfactor Metrics A searchable database of Eigenfactor and Article Influence scores.
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database .
CiteScore Metrics Using data from Scopus, CiteScore metrics measure citation impact for journals, book series, conference proceedings, and trade journals.

Citation Impact

Citation impact refers to the number of times a publication is cited by subsequent publications. Use of citation counts in research metrics assumes that significant publications will demonstrate a high citation count.

The following tools can be used to obtain citation counts:

Web of Science This link opens in a new window Web of Science provides citation counts and the citing articles for any article in its database.
Scopus This link opens in a new window Scopus is an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature including scientific journals, books, and conference proceedings. Scopus provides a comprehensive overview of worldwide research output in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities, along with tools to track, analyze, and visualize research.
Dimensions This link opens in a new window Dimensions counts citations from the reference list in all publications that have been indexed by Dimensions.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window Google Scholar shows citing articles, but its results can contain duplicates or incomplete citations.

Article Impact

The Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) is a metric used to assess relative scholarly influence that a scientific article has had, as compared to other NIH-funded research. RCR metrics can be obtained using Dimensions or NIH's iCite Database.

iCite

Dimensions This link opens in a new window

Publishing: Measuring Impact

Measuring Research Impact

Researcher Impact

Alternative Metrics (Altmetrics)

Journal Impact

Citation Impact

Article Impact