LibGuides: Research Impact & Engagement: Home

Welcome

Whether you are a researcher, scholar, teacher, extension agent, staff, student, or any combination of these, this guide is designed to highlight options for ensuring your work is discoverable online, sharing your work broadly, and connecting with others in your field. Utilizing some of the approaches and tools in this guide can help you succeed in professional networking, being recognized for your work, and metrics to understand others' interest in your work to document relevant impact and engagement.

Research Impact

Research impact is the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to academia, society and the economy:

Academic impact: Contribution to academic advances, across and within disciplines, in understanding, methods, theory and application
Societal impact: Benefit to individuals, organizations and nations by enhancing quality of life, health and creative output, and increasing the effectiveness of public services and policy
Economic impact: Attracting investment, wealth creation, enhanced national and global competitiveness

The above statements were adapted from the Research Councils UK.

There are several reasons to measure your research impact:

Application for promotion or tenure
Quantify return on research investment for grant renewals and progress reports
Future funding requests
Identify who is using your work and confirm that it is appropriately credited
Identify collaborators within or outside of your discipline

Claim Your Research

Author identifiers are unique identifiers that allow authors to distinguish themselves from other researchers and to unabiguously associate themselves with their work.

Author ambiguity in the scholarly community is a persistent problem due to:

One author publishing under multiple variations of the same name
Common names
Name changes, e.g. marriage

ORCID iD is a service that allows you to register for a unique author identifier. This iD helps you claim your research which can in turn increase the accuracy of impact metrics with your research. This iD can be linked with your Google Scholar profile, and many publishers allow you to associate your ORCID iD with your work. Registering for an ORCID iD is both free and user friendly.

Google Scholar allows you to create a scholarly profile (hint: click on the "my profile" in the upper left-hand side to set this up). Maintaining a Google Scholar profile allows you list your articles, connect your ORCID iD, track your citations, and help your work be discovered online. Their analytics will help track your citations, h-index, and i10 index. See this post on 7 Ways to Make Your Google Scholar Profile Better.

Scopus automatically generates an author identifier for authors in the Scopus database and attempts to disambiguate authors and build an author profile. Citation metrics are included with each author profile. You cannot edit your author profile yourself, but you can request corrections if publications are incorrectly assigned (or missing from) your profile or you find other errors.