Research Impact: Getting Started

"Impact" describes the reach and influence of a scholar's work. Assessment of impact attempts to reconstruct the value you have given back to the community by examining things such as ...

• How many scholars have continued the conversation by citing your articles?
• Who is citing your articles?
• What kinds of outcomes has your research led to? Have people built better protocols, instrumentation, or practice based on work you have done?
• Who is noticing you? Have you given presentations to the government? To your local community?
• What kind of impact have you had on your advisees? What impact has your advisor had on you?

Bibliometrics is the statistical analysis of bibliographic data, commonly focusing on citation analysis of research outputs and publications, i.e. how many times research outputs and publications are being cited. Bibliometric analysis is becoming an increasingly important way to measure and assess research impact of individuals, groups of individuals or institutions. Bibliometrics can help you to make decisions about where to publish your research and how to get information about the impact of published research. This guide provides information about the most common tools that individual researchers or research administrators can use to measure the impact of their own or their institutions impact.

Article/Book Impact: The impact of particular works, such as journal articles, conference proceedings, and books, can be measured by the number of times they are cited by other works.

Journal impact: The impact of particular academic journals can be measured by the number of times their articles are cited and where they are cited.

Researcher impact: The number of works a researcher has published and the number of times these works have been cited can be an indicator for the impact of an individual researcher

Institutional impact: The prestige of a department or area of research within an institution can be measured by the collective impact of its individual researchers compared to those at other institutions.

We would like to thank Michael Ladisch, University College Dublin Library for his permission to use some contents of their guides.