Researcher metrics

Metrics can measure the contribution or impact you have made in your field or discipline. Research funders will expect you to show the impact of your research.

Before you start to measure your impact, identify why you are measuring your impact to help you determine if there are any specific types of data required or excluded. Make sure you understand the publishing and impact norms within your discipline so you can interpret your metrics data and tell the impact story of your research in context. Library staff provide support with measuring your research metrics.

There are different ways to measure your impact.

Citation–based measures are most useful to those researchers in the ‘pure’ sciences, or in fields with a relatively high overall citation rate.

Citation counts

Citation counts can be gathered for:

an individual article (how often it was cited)
an author (total citations, or average citation count per article)
a journal (average citation count for the articles in the journal).

The three main tools to generate a citation count include Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.

H-index

The h-index is an important measure of an author’s influence, or your research productivity and impact. The index reflects your most cited publications and the number of citations they accrued in other publications. For example, to have an h-index of 10, you must have at least 10 publications with at least 10 citations each.

Your h-index can be calculated by a Google Scholar profile which lists your publications, an ORCID ID, or via Scopus or Web of Science.

Issues to be aware of

In general, H-index values can only be compared within a single discipline. For example, an average medical researcher will generally have much larger h-index values than a world-class mathematician. Even within a discipline, comparing h-index values is only useful if all information has been found using the same database and method.

It is therefore useful to identify your h-index by its source e.g. a 'Scopus h-index'.

The h-index may be less useful in some disciplines, as different publishing and citation patterns may mean that there are not enough citations available to generate a useful measure, and if the publications and citations are not indexed in databases.

Also, citation patterns vary widely between disciplines and across types of publications. Care should be taken when comparing citation counts.

There are three main tools to generate graphs of your citation patterns including Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.

Citer analysis

Citer analysis provides qualitative measures of your research impact by providing information about the citations of your work, including:

who is citing your research
where they are
what institution they're from
in which publications they have published
in which discipline they have published.

Finding out who is citing you and where they come from can help you show:

significance of your impact
trends in publishing in your field
evidence that your work is influential across multiple disciplines

Scopus and Web of Science can provide you with graphs and analytic tools for this type of information.
If your work is not widely indexed or cited in Scopus or Web of Science, you can get much of this information from Google Scholar and disciplinary specific databases.

Showing that your work is being discussed, shared and disseminated across a wide range of platforms could be just as useful as citations when you are exploring whether your work is reaching your audience. This becomes especially important if your research is focused on the social sciences and humanities and has more ‘social’ impact than citation impact. The following impact measures may be useful:

Altmetrics

Altmetrics measures can be based on different types of research products including re-use of datasets, views of presentation slides, and interactions with publications.

Altmetrics sources can be loosely categorised into any of the different ways that your work may be interacted with online including usage, captures, mentions, social media, and citations.

Altmetrics allows you to see patterns that may not be obvious from citations alone and give context to your research impact rather than trying to boil it down to individual numbers.

Many Altmetrics are closely tied to Open Access as they rely on freely available information from the web. If your research is available through open access journals or via RISE Research Repository it is more likely to be discovered by these different products.

There are a range Altmetrics tools available. You can also embed the Altmetric badge to track where your research has gained attention for free.

Media coverage

Media coverage in all disciplines can be picked up in a number of databases including Factiva, and Australia/NZ Reference Centre.

Other measures

We recommend that researchers in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences keep an Impact Journal to keep a record of any mentions of your work in media, or to make a note of when you are asked to speak at events or in the media. Keeping this record can help demonstrate your impact outside of the traditional scholarly world or how you’re changing practice or impacting policy.

Factors to consider when deciding how to measure your impact:

How do you promote your research?
Who is your audience
How do you connect with them?

Asking yourself these questions can help you to focus on the different types of impact that you may be having.

Contact us

Research Support Team