Author Impact
An author's impact on their field or discipline has traditionally been measured using the number of times their academic publications are cited by other researchers. There are numerous algorithms that account for such things as the recency of the publication, or poorly or highly cited papers. While citation metrics may reflect the impact of research in a field, there are many potential biases with these measurements and they should be used with care. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a critique of author impact factors. See the Research Impact & Engagement guide for information beyond what is listed below.
- H-IndexThe most widely used research metric, measures both productivity and impact of an author's scholarly output. Tools for calculating your H-index include Web of Science and Google Scholar.
- G-IndexProposed in 2006 by Leo Egghe as an alternative to the H-index, adds more weight to highly cited articles.
- i10-IndexA very simple measure of impact, this metric is only used by Google Scholar.
- Publish or PerishPublish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents results.
- CiteScore Journal MetricsCiteScore is a product from Elsevier, using citation data from the Scopus database to rank journals. As with other journal ranking metrics, to compare journals across disciplines requires a "normalized" ranking, which CiteScore provides as a percentile ranking within the journal's subject category. In addition to the CiteScore number and percentile ranking, CiteScore also includes the SJR (Scimago Journal Rank) and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) numbers.
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
Author Identifiers
Author identifiers are unique identifiers that allow authors to distinguish themselves from other researchers and to unambiguously 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
- Cultural differences in naming
- Sign Up for an ORCidThe Open Researcher Community ID is an increasingly recognized persistent digital identifier. The unique number assigned to you will allow publishers and aggregators of scholarly literature to distinguish you from researchers with similar names. This is a powerful tool in author disambiguation and it takes just a few minutes to sign up. Go to orcid.org and follow the instructions to register for your ORCID identifier or to connect an existing ORCID account to your Cornell NetID. Have questions? Contact orcid-help@cornell.edu
- Create a Google Scholar Citations ProfileGoogle scholar citations allows authors to track citations to their scholarly works and to calculate numerous citation metrics based on Google Scholar citation data. By setting up a profile, you will be able to disambiguate yourself from authors with the same or similar names.
- Scopus
This link opens in a new window
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.
Altmetrics
Altmetrics, or alternative metrics, are new measures that take into account online reader behavior, network interactions with content, and social media. Altmetrics are meant to complement, not completely replace, traditional impact measures of online attention and engagement.
- Altmetric.comA commercial venture that provides a suite of tools to researchers, authors, and publishers to understand and apply open metrics to articles and collections of articles.
- Plum AnalyticsPlum Analytics categorizes metrics into five separate types: Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media, and Citations, then aggregates this output into a researcher graph.
- Impact StoryAn open-source website that helps researchers explore and share the online impact of their research, helping to build a new scholarly reward system that values and encourages web-native scholarship.
