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Research Impact Metrics

Provides an overview of Research Impact Metrics

Output Metrics

Several metrics are used to measure the impact of scholarly articles and book chapters. Here are some of the most common ones:

  1. Citations: the number of times an article is cited by other works. This is a traditional and widely used metric.
  2. Citation Percentile: indicates the relative citation performance of a publication compared to others in the same field, year, and document type. 
  3. Field-Weighted and Category Normalized Citation Impact: compares the number of citations an article receives to the average number of citations received by similar articles.
  4. Altmetric Attention Score: measures the attention an article receives from non-traditional sources like social media, news outlets, and policy documents.
  5. Usage Metrics: includes the number of views and downloads an article receives.

These metrics provide a comprehensive view of an article’s reach and influence within the academic community and beyond. 

Some research outputs are films, exhibitions, social media posts or blogs, performances or works of art.  These last few outputs are measured by non-traditional research outputs.

Citations are an established measure of research impact, however, analysis offered by different tools will have varying results. When reviewing citation counts consider: 

  • databases collect data from different sources and calculate their metrics differently
  • a journal you've published in might not be indexed by the main citation analysis tools, you may have to look elsewhere
  • recent research articles may not yet have been cited
  • not all contributions to journals are citable e.g. letters to the editor
  • formats such as books and web sites may not be counted
  • frequency of a journal may affect counts
  • highly cited articles don't always mean excellent research, esteem must also be taken in to account
  • research measures across disciplines may differ.