Scholarly Communication Support: Planning, Conducting, Disseminating, Promoting, & Assessing Research

When integrating metrics into CVs or for other purposes, be sure to consider the wide array of possible metrics and choose those which are most appropriate to your work, your discipline, and the purpose for which these metrics are being shared.

Areas of research impact could include:

• Intellectual impact: Academic/scholarly knowledge, thought, understanding
• Cultural impact
• Economic impact
• Environmental impact
• Social impact
• Impact on health and wellbeing
• Policy influence and change
• Impact on or change in practice (teaching, nursing, ...etc.)
• Legal impact
• Technological developments

Citation behaviors (and thus citation rates) vary greatly between disciplines. Understand the normal citation patterns in your field to maintain the proper perspective on citations of your own work. 

For example, if your discipline places an emphasis on publishing books which may take ten years to garner a citation, you may be less concerned whether your book receives citations within one year of publication. On the other hand, if your discipline centers around the publication of journal articles, and the majority of research receives at least one citation within its first year, then you will have different expectations for your work. 

The article below explains more about the differences among disciplines in citation culture and citation rates.

Dimensions.ai

Dimensions is large but not necessarily comprehensive. If it includes your article, you will see how many citations it has identified. You may have been cited by additional works that are not indexed by Dimensions. This is one source to use in compiling data on your published articles.

Google Scholar

Learn about some other articles that have cited your published article.

Google Scholar is vast but not necessarily comprehensive. If it includes your article, you will see how many citations you have had from other articles that are also included in Google Scholar. You may have been cited by additional works that are not included in Google Scholar. This is one source to use in compiling data on your published articles.

Publish or Perish - A Better Source of Google Scholar Data

This is a FREE software package from Anne-Wil Harzing, Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. It leverages citation data from sources such as Google Scholar, but lets you query, interact with, and download that data in unique ways. Metrics available in Publish or Perish include total citations, average citations per paper or author, age-weighted citation rates, h-index, g-index, and more. The software can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X, or GNU/Linux.

Web of Science

Learn what other researchers are citing your published work to provide evidence of your impact as a researcher in your field.

Web of Science is not comprehensive. If another articles cited you and is also included in Web of Science, then you will see that citation. You may have been cited by additional works that are not included in Web of Science. This is just one source to include in your compilation of data on your published articles.

This video tutorial, created by the Georgia Institute of Technology, gives a brief demonstration of using Web of Science to do a Cited Reference Search (in other words, to find out who is citing your paper!).

Policy Commons

What are Altmetrics?

Alternative metrics, or altmetrics, are evidence of scholarship being discussed online. This includes links, shares, views, and downloads in social media, blogs, and other venues, which can demonstrate popular or societal impact in areas such as education, public policy, etc. Altmetrics are meant to complement more traditional article citation counts.

How to Use Altmetrics

In choosing which metrics to report and how to report them, you must make decisions that best suit your work, your discipline, and your department. Altmetrics may be one element of telling your story; these resources will help you understand how to explain them and incorporate them into documentation.

Finding Altmetrics with Dimensions.ai

Many traditional metrics are limited to journal articles, but there are other ways to demonstrate the impact of your book publication.

• book and chapter citations (can be found through tools like Google Scholar)
• adopted as a class textbook
• included on 'bestseller' lists
• awards and honours received
• number of copies sold
• editions
• translations into other languages  

​How Many Library Hold My Book?

WorldCat is essentially a combined library catalog for hundreds of thousands of libraries around the world. Search for your book in WorldCat to see how many participating libraries have added your book to their collections. You might even pull the names of a few institutions you consider meaningful or prestigious that hold your work.

Syllabi Adoptions

Report that your book has been assigned as required or optional reading in other professors' syllabi--this can show impact on education in your discipline. The Open Syllabus Project will allow you to search for your work and (if found) see the number of syllabi that reference it.
Read more: What do syllabi-based altmetrics actually mean?
Note: This project is not a comprehensive database of all university syllabi.

Book Reviews (Scholarly, Professional, Popular)

What Is the H-Index?

• A citation-based metric that attempts to measure the influence of an individual researcher (or group of researchers, such as an institution) by considering both productivity (quantity) and impact.
• Represents the point at which a scholar has h publications with h citations each. If a scholar has published 10 articles with at least 10 citations each, his h-index is 10.

Advantages of the H-Index

• Improvement over total count of publications (which may have no impact) and total count of citations (which may be skewed by one item with significant impact).
• May prove particularly informative when used to compare peers in a discipline with a similar number of years in the field.

Disadvantages / Warnings

• Should only be compared within a discipline but not between disciplines, since publishing and citing patterns vary among fields.
• The length of time in a field impacts h-index, and it thus favors senior researchers and disadvantages early career researchers.

Where to Find H-Index

• Freely available from Google Scholar at scholar.google.com for researchers with a Google Scholar Citations page.
• Can be obtained from commercial tools such as the Web of Science database (Thomson Reuters), provided by the SHSU library.
• Can be calculated with the free Harzing's Publish or Perish program, or the Scholarometer browser extension, both of which use Google Scholar data.
• Here is an example of citation counts and an h-index score from a researcher's Google Scholar Citations page:

Caveat

• There is professional debate over h-index as a metric. Understand pros and cons before deciding whether and to what extent to use it. 
• The following article, although targeted at librarians, may provide any researcher with a foundational understanding of this debate. 

Possible Alternatives to H-index (but with their own weaknesses)

Your Story as the Framework

Metrics are meaningless without appropriate context. Your story should always come FIRST; then add data as appropriate to support the narrative.

First write out your story in clear language, as you might tell it to a family member who asks why your work matters. How do you describe your researcher identity? Who is your audience, and what is the significance of your work to that audience? How does your work fit into the culture, values, or goals of your discipline? Your institution? 

Then carefully collect appropriate, relevant metrics that provide evidence for the value described in your story. Integrate these metrics into your story, being sure to explain clearly what they are and what they indicate.

Aspects to Consider

• Authorship - What are the norms in your field, and what is valued? Is this a sole authorship or a collaboration, and why is that important? Is there significance in the identity of your collaborators, e.g., bringing interdisciplinary expertise, a weighty disciplinary reputation, etc.? What are the practices in your discipline for author byline order, and how do those norms apply to this work? Does being the first author or the last author indicate greater significance? (If your narrative may be read by someone with less familiarity of your field, they will likely need this explanation, because interpretations of byline order differ between fields.) 
• Journal - Is it the official journal of an important scholarly association in your field? Why is it significant that your work is in this journal specifically, not just based on metrics, but based on its content scope, mission, history, longevity, reputation/status, etc. Who is the readership for this journal? How is that readership important for reaching your target audience?
• Open access - If your work was published in an open-access journal, how does that fit with the values of your discipline and/or your institution? What were your reasons or goals for publishing OA, and what have been the outcomes so far?
• Citations - How has attention to your work changed over time? Regardless of total citation counts, have your later works garnered more citations than your early works, showing an increase in attention to your work over time? 
• Geographic location of views, downloads, and other attention metrics - How national or international is your reach? Has international attention to your work increased over time? How does your work becoming increasingly international fit with the goals of your work or the values and goals of your discipline or institution?
• % of citations per discipline / subject area - How is interdisciplinary influence important to your goals? Has your work received increasing attention from other disciplines over time? 
• Reproducibility - To what extent has your work been proven reproducible, reproduced, and/or validated by other researchers?
• Teaching impact - Has your work been adopted in course syllabi, been cited in a textbook, or otherwise influenced teaching in your field?
• Practice and policy impact - Has your work informed, influenced, or changed practice or policy, whether within your field, an organization, public/society, etc.? How does this align with your goals? Does it support the larger values or goals of your institution? 
• Values in your field - What values are foundational to your discipline, and how has your work demonstrated your commitment to those values? One example might be openness; if your field values openness, you could demonstrate it by publishing in open-access journals and/or sharing your research data in an open repository for others to reuse. Or your field might value collaboration, and you can highlight your work with other researchers, institutions, non-academic organizations, etc. To identify the values your field prioritizes, you might explore the mission and values statements from key professional associations.
• Research agendas and "roadmaps" - If a professional association in your field has defined a framework / agenda / list of priorities to guide research in needed areas, then explain how your work relates to that framework and how you are furthering the research agenda that your discipline has identified as important. You might also relate your work to an agenda larger than just your field, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda.

Data Visualizations

In addition to specific metrics, consider what data visualizations might be helpful. Bar charts, pie charts, geographical maps, network maps?

Anecdotes

Seek strong anecdotes to accompany numbers, especially with altmetrics--for example, share one thoughtful and substantive tweet about your work from an important peer in your field. Anecdotes help to illustrate quality of attention, rather than quantity alone.

Frameworks, Processes, and Examples

The following frameworks may be helpful in deciding how to compile and communicate a well-rounded array of metrics.

Some Narrative Excerpt Examples (Fictional / Idealized)