My Research Impact:

What, why and how?

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What is it?

• Citation analysis is a widely accepted measure of the impact or influence of your research

• It is based on the concept that the number of times you get cited is meaningful – the more citations, the greater the relevance

• Citation analysis tools measure the number of times your published research has been cited by other researchers (the ‘citation count’)

• It is important to be aware of the scope of all citation tools because no one tool measures all publications

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Citation Count

• Provides the number of times your publications have been cited

• The amount of citations to a paper may not be a reflection of the paper’s quality

• Self-citations can distort the citation count results

• Metrics are not as well established in some disciplines such as arts, humanities, social sciences & business

• The calculation also depends on the tool used

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h - index

• Used to qualify the impact and quantity of your research output

• h-index is the number of papers that have been cited at least h times– ie. an h-index of 20 tells us that the author has

published 20 papers that have been cited at least 20 times

• Your h-index will depend on the length of time you have been publishing and on the tool used

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Why use it?

• Measure your personal research effectiveness

• Grant applications

• Promotion & recruitment

• Benchmarking

• Performance evaluation

• Identify potential collaborators

• Identify emerging areas of researchImage: futureatlas.com/wikimedia commons

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How to get started?

• Tools & metrics vary between disciplines

• Be aware of the limitations of each tool and the data sources from which the metrics are retrieved.

• Accurate metrics require the tool to index the author’s publication titles as well as the cited publication titles

• No single tool is comprehensive

• Note: negative citations are counted as valid

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Main points to remember

• Don’t rely on one single tool.

• Investigate each tool to see what suits your research profile

• Some disciplines rely less on publishing in academic journals

• Use a combination of metrics with other qualitative information

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Help

• View the Citation Analysis LibGuide for further information and instructions on how to use the various tools

• Contact your Faculty Librarian

Attribution: MyRI: My Research Impact (An Open Access toolkit to support bibliometrics training & awareness).

Image: impact / impakt/n. bySickMouthy