Skip to Main Content

Research Visibility

How to raise the visiblity of your research and establish your name in an academic field.

Impact Metrics and Scholarly Attribution

Information to assist faculty members, research staff, and graduate students in understanding how to use impact metrics tools currently available.

Considerations need to be made in regards to the role that the author, content, source, impact, ranking, and benchmark have on the research cycle.

Four main areas can be used to determine the impact of research:

H-index i10-Index
  • Most widely used research metric
  • Measures both productivity (# of publications) and the impact of the publications based on the number of times the publication has been cited.
  • Available for use on both 'Web of Science' and Google Scholar
  • Used by Google Scholar
  • Shows the number of a researcher's publications that have been cited at least tem times by other scholars
  • Developed and introduced in 2011 by Google
  • Only available for use on Google Scholar

Altmetrics

Some of the metrics used for altmetrics are following

  • Blogs: The blog (feed) citations are from a manually-curated list of about 2,200 science blogs, derived from the indexes at Nature.com Blogs, Research Blogging and ScienceSeeker. 
  • FbWalls: A licensed Facebook account is used for Wall posts to check for citations.
  •  Tweets: Tweets from a licensed Twitter handle are checked for citations.
  •  Google+: The Google+ Applications Programming Interface (API) is used to identify Google+ posts to check for citations.
  • RH: Research highlights are identified from Nature Publishing Group journals.
  • MSM: The mainstream media citation count is based on a manually curated list of about 60 newspapers and magazines using links in their science coverage.
  •  LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com posts from the LinkedIn API are checked for citations.
  • Reddits: Reddit.com posts from the Reddit API are checked for citations.
  • Forums: Forums are scraped for citations.
  • Pinners: Pinterest.com is scraped for citations.
  • Q&A: The Stack Exchange API and scraping of older Q&A using the open source version of Stack Exchange’s code are used to get online questions and answers to check for citations. 3.0 Bibliometrics to Altmetrics The idea of libraries as a collection based centers of metric support goes back to at 

Altmetrics

The new approach to evaluate articles is to evaluate each article on its own merits, regardless of the journal where the article is published. This is done by using article level metrics, altmetrics. Altmetrics focuses on social media e.g. discussions in blogs or researcher networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu, tweets in Twitter, amount of downloads of an article, citations and mentions in Mendeley and/or Google Scholar. In comparison to bibliometrics altmetrics is very fast. It takes years for an article to get citations. In opposite an article can get tweets in one day.