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Research Impact Metrics

Provides an overview of Research Impact Metrics

Demonstrating Researcher Performance and Impact

As a researcher, you will often want to create a report which details your research performance and impact.

Think of your report as a descriptive narrative that tells the story of your unique contribution to knowledge. Use a variety of different measures that provide evidence of your achievement, engagement and esteem. Demonstrate that you are producing high quality scholarship, that you have national and international recognition in your discipline, and that you have the capacity to build research partnerships.

Tailor your story for the intended purpose and audience.

Metrics include:

  • Number of research outputs
  • Number of citations received
  • H-index
  • Number of research outputs in top citation percentiles and in top journal percentiles
  • Field-weighted and category normalized citation impact
  • Number of collaborations with international partners, interdisciplinary partners, or industry partners
  • Benchmarking against other researchers
  • Number of patents and/or number of research articles referenced by patents
  • Altmetrics

 

Creating Researcher Reports

SciVal uses Scopus data. To begin using SciVal to create reports, export your Scopus Author Profile to SciVal. Your profile will then be listed in the Researchers section of My SciVal, and will be available for use in all the SciVal modules.

The Overview module allows you to generate a overall research performance report that can be exported as a PDF. This comprehensive report includes

  • A summary of research performance including a full list of publications, citations, h-index, research topics and performance indicators such as academic-corporate collaboration, publications in top journal percentiles, outputs in top citation percentiles, international collaboration.
  • More detailed analysis of research topics and collaborations.
  • More detailed analysis of research output and citations, including Top 5 publications
  • Number of Scopus views received by publications.
  • Field-Weighted Citation Metric 

Field-Weighted Citation impact takes into account the differences in research behaviour across disciplines and indicates how the number of citations received by a researcher's publications compares with the average number of citations received by all other similar publications indexed in the Scopus database.

  • A Field-Weighted Citation Impact of 1.00 indicates that the publications have been cited at world average for similar publications.
  • A Field-Weighted Citation Impact of greater than 1.00 indicates that the publications have been cited more than would be expected based on the world average for similar publications, for example a score of 1.44 means that the outputs have been cited 44% more times than expected.
  • A Field-Weighted Citation Impact of less than 1.00 indicates that the publications have been cited less that would be expected based on the world average for similar publications, for example a score of 0.85 means 15% less cited than world average.

Similar publications are those publications in the Scopus database that have the same publication year, publication type and discipline.

Field-Weighted Citation Impact refers to citations received in the year of publication plus the following 3 years.

Field-Weighted Citation Impact metrics are useful to benchmark regardless of differences in size, disciplinary profile, age and publication type composition, and provide and useful way to evaluate the prestige of a researcher’s citation performance.

The Benchmarking module lets you evaluate your research performance in comparison to others. You can choose which researchers, or groups of researchers, to make comparisons with, and can compare a variety of metrics including scholarly output, citations, h-indices, collaboration, economic impact and societal impact.

The Collaboration module lets you evaluate your existing research collaborations and identify new opportunities for collaboration in Australia and worldwide.

Scopus and Web of Science can also generate reports that include author metrics.

InCites uses Web of Science data. To begin, choose the Researchers tile and filter by Person Name or ID. For best results use your ORCID or Web Of Science Researcher ID rather than your name. Choose to use the InCites Dataset and include ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index). A summary of benchmarking metrics can be downloaded from this page.

The Reports dropdown allows you to create a Researcher report. This generates a overall research performance report that can be exported as a PDF. This comprehensive report includes

  • A summary of research performance including a full list of publications, citations, h-index, research topics and performance indicators such as academic-corporate collaboration, publications in top journal percentiles, outputs in top citation percentiles, international collaboration.
  • More detailed analysis of research topics and collaborations.
  • More detailed analysis of research output and citations, including Top 10 publications
  • More detailed analysis of research output by Journal Impact Factor quartiles
  • Category Normalized Citation Impact

​Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) is citations per paper normalized for subject, year and document type. It is calculated by dividing the actual count of citing items by the expected citation rate for documents with the same document type, year of publication and subject area. The CNCI of a set of documents, for example, the collected works of an individual, institution, or country, is the average of the CNCI values for all the documents in the set.

 

CNCI is a valuable and unbiased indicator of impact irrespective of age, subject focus or document type. Therefore, it allows comparisons between entities of different sizes and different subject mixes. A CNCI value of one represents performance at par with world average, values above one are considered above average and values below one are considered below average. A CNCI value of two is considered twice world average.

H,G & M Index

  • The h-index is a metric that attempts to qualify the impact and the quantity of a researcher's publication output
  • The h-index favours established researchers as it increases over time
  • The index h, defined as the number of papers with citation number higher or equal to h, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher (J. E. Hirsch. (2005). An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(46), 16569)

H-index plot
H-index_plot by Ael 2 at English Wikipedia [Public domain]

 

G-Index is calculated by ranking author's articles from highest to lowest citations, then find the largest number (the top g articles received together at least g2 citations).

 

Advantages of the G-Index:

  • Accounts for the performance of author's top articles
  • Helps to make more apparent the difference between authors' respective impacts.  The inflated values of the G-Index help to give credit to lowly-cited or non-cited papers while giving credit for highly-cited papers.  

Disadvantages of the G-Index:

  • Introduced in 2006. and debate continues whether G-Index is superior to H-Index.  
  • Might not be as widely accepted as H-Index.  

The G-index was proposed by Leo Egghe in his paper "Theory and Practice of the G-Index" in 2006 as an improvement on the H-Index.  

The m-index is calculated by dividing the h-index by the number of years that an author has been active, defined as the years since the date of first publication.

Advantages of the m-index:

  • Attempts to correct for the fact that the h-index is highly influenced by the age and length of career of the researcher.
  • Allows for comparisons to be made between researchers within a field at different career stages.

Weakness of the m-index:

  • Assumes continuous research activity since the author's first publication.

The i10-index was created by Google Scholar and is used in Scholar's "My Citations" feature.

i10-index = the number of publications with at least 10 citations

Advantages of the i10-index

  • Very simple and straightforward to calculate
  • My Citations in Google Scholar is free and easy to use

Disadvantages of the i10-index

  • Used only in Google Scholar

Find your H-index

Scopus can be used to obtain a range of metrics relating to an author and their work. To generate an author profile which includes h-index click the Authors search and search by name or ORCID. For best results use ORCID. On the search results page click on the author name to view the profile.

This page contains profile information about the author and their publications that are indexed in Scopus. It also contains a full publication list. This information is customisable and a report can be exported.

The Researcher Reports generated in SciVal and InCites both also include the h-index.

Web of Science can calculate a range of author metrics, including h-index. For best results choose Author Identifiers from the search dropdown and use ORCID or Web of Science ResearcherID. Alternatively use the Author dropdown and search via surname and initials.

On the results page click Create Citation Report. This includes graphs showing citation patterns and a calculation of the author's h-index. This report is customisable and can be exported.

 

Google Scholar @ MQ allows you to set up a profile which contains your publications and citations counts. The profile also provides you with various author metrics, such as h-index. In order to set up your profile, you need to have a Google account. 

Once you have created your profile, citations and h-index will be automatically calculated from Google Scholar data and displayed on your profile page.