LibGuides: Increasing Researcher Visibility and Research Impact: Home

Measuring your Research Impact

About the researcher's impact:

It is often measured using methods such as citation counts, the h-index, and journal impact factors;
No single tool or system measures impact entirely;
Each database or tool uses its own measurement systems, indices, data, and authority files;
Tools have different research and publication practices making it difficult to compare across disciplines that;
There are limitations to existing metrics and tools;
There is no one number to perfectly or “correctly” represent the research impact of an individual or a group of researchers.

Source: NC State University Libraries

Tools to Increase Research Visibility and Impact

We wish to encourage you to do the following:

Register for an ORCID iD at https://orcid.org/;
Share your research output on the WSU Institutional Repository:http://vital.seals.ac.za:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository;
Add your research data on the WSU Figshare to increase your research data metrics: https://wsu.figshare.com/;
Make use of Citation analysis tools such as:
- Scopus
- Web of Science
- Publish or Perish (PoP)
Track citations counts, h-index, and altmetrics using these citation analysis tools;
Create a Google Scholar Profile where you can link and add your publications;
Create accounts with Research Social Networking platforms such as Twitter, Mendeley, ResearchGate, Linkedln, Academia, and so on.
Contact the Institutional Repository Office for assistance where needed.

Measures you can use

An author's impact on their field or discipline is measured using the number of times they have published and the number of times other researchers cite their academic publications. However, numerous algorithms based on publication data have also been created. Some metrics and tools you can use to measure your research impact include:

Individual Metrics

1. h-index

Attempts to measure: quality and quantity of author's work
h-index is the number of papers (h) that have received (h) or more citations. An author with an h-index of 8 has 8 papers cited at least 8 times.

2. g-index

Uses the quality and quantity of the author's work, with more weight on quality. To calculate the g-index, an author’s articles are ranked in decreasing order based on the number of citations each received. The unique largest number such that the top g articles received, together, at least g^2 citations is the g-index.

3. 10-index

Quality of author's work
Counts the number of publications with at least 10 citations

2. Group or Departmental metrics

A research group or department may wish to gauge the impact of its research or learn how it compares to its peers. However, similar to individual impact measures, these numbers can give only a partial story of impact.

Publication Activity and Citation Count

Assessing the impact for a group or department is achieved by searching all the individuals in the group and combining their names with the OR search operator.
Depending on the data source included, the h-index for a group takes all the publications of every group member and creates a cumulative score.

Below are some common tools used to obtain publication and citation data:

Web of Science (available through Walter Sisulu University subscription): Citation database that allows you to create a Citation Report and calculate an h-index.
Publish or Perish (free): One software program is downloaded and installed on a computer. It allows researchers to provide evidence of their research impact. Citations are obtained from Google Scholar. Besides basic statistics, it calculates H-index, G-index, and E-index, among others.
Scholarometer (free): A browser extension that queries Google Scholar. Network visualizations are based on crowdsourced discipline annotations of the queried authors.
Google Scholar (free) and CiteSeerX (free): Both can be used to obtain citation counts for articles. Google Scholar Citations also allows authors to keep track of citations to their articles.