“A poll of Nature’s readers suggests that feelings about metrics are mixed. Many researchers say that, in principle, they welcome the use of quantitative performance metrics because of the potential for clarity and objectivity. Yet they also worry that the hiring, promotion and tenure committees that control their fate will ignore crucial but hard-to-quantify aspects of scientific performance such as mentorship and collaboration building, and instead focus exclusively on a handful of easy-to-measure numbers related mostly to their publication and citation rates.”

“. . . transparency is essential: no matter how earnestly evaluation committees say that they are assessing the full body of a scientist’s work, not being open about the criteria breeds the impression that a fixed number of publications is a strict requirement, that teaching is undervalued and that service to the community is worthless. Such impressions do more than breed discontent — they alter the way that scientists behave. To promote good science, those doors must be opened wide.”

Check out the special Science Metrics section that Nature created to facilitate discussion on metrics for assessing scientific performance.

• Article usage statistics – HTML pageviews, PDF downloads and XML downloads
• Citations from the scholarly literature – currently from PubMed Central, Scopus and CrossRef
• Social bookmarks – currently from CiteULike and Connotea
• Comments – left by readers of each article
• Notes – left by readers of each article
• Blog posts – aggregated from Postgenomic, Nature Blogs, and Bloglines
• Ratings – left by readers of each article

“. . .article-level metrics will attempt to capture the actions and opinions of entire communities of readers to give a rich and sophisticated picture of research impact that will be helpful to authors and readers alike. Readers may then frame that picture in the context of their particular field and their own work.”

For more information on Assessment of Research Impact, see Assessing the Impact of Research.

“Our results indicate that the notion of scientific impact is a multi-dimensional construct that can not be adequately measured by any single indicator, although some measures are more suitable than others. The commonly used citation Impact Factor is not positioned at the core of this construct, but at its periphery, and should thus be used with caution.”

• 5-Year Journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from a journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year. For journals in subjects where citation activity continues to rise through several years, this metric allows more of their total citation activity to be included in a critical performance metric.
• Eigenfactor^TM Metrics, comprising the Eigenfactor^TM Score and Article Influence^TM Score, use JCR citation data to assess the influence of a journal in relation to other journals. These metrics, based on five years of citation activity, consider not just the count of citations but the structure of the citation network. Eigenfactor Metrics are available only for JCR years 2007 and later.
• Journal Self Cites provides analyses of journal self citations and their contribution to the Journal Impact Factor calculation.
• Rank-in-Category reveals the ranking of a journal in its subject categories based on the Journal Impact Factor. An accompanying Impact Factor box plot depicts the distribution of Impact Factors for all journals in a category.

SCOPUS (subscription required)
SCOPUS provides an Author Search option that allows for a listing of articles, web sources and patents that cite a particular author’s work since 1996. The Citation Tracker feature also allows for generation of a Citation Overview chart (total number of times all works have been cited and the number of times a work has been cited each year) and calculation of the h index for an author since 1996.

• SCOPUS Citation Tracker
• SCOPUS h index 

Thomson ISI Web of Science  (subscription required)
ISI Web of Science provides an Author Finder option that allows for a listing of articles that cite a particular author’s work.  The Author Finder feature also allows for generation of a Citation report (total number of times all works have been cited and the number of times a work has been cited each year) and calculation of the h index for authors (date range depends on subscribed backfiles).  

• Author Finder Tutorial

Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge ISI HighlyCited.com
ISI HighlyCited.com is a freely accessible website that provides a listing the top researchers from 21 subject categories whose publications were the most highly cited for the period 1981-1999.

“ISIHighlyCited.com reveals the face of research–the people behind the accomplishments in 21 broad subject categories in life sciences, medicine, physical sciences, engineering and social sciences. These individuals are the most highly cited within each category for the period 1981-1999, and comprise less than one-half of one percent of all publishing researchers–truly an extraordinary accomplishment.”

• How Does ISI HighlyCited Identify Highly Cited Researchers?

Google Scholar 
Google Scholar allows for searching of a particular publication and retrieves results from a variety of sources such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, meeting abstracts, web sites, gray literature, and others. The results include the number of times the publication was cited in other resources.

PubMed FaceOff
PubMed Faceoff is a “mash-up” of PubMed, the Eigen factor of a journal and SCOPUS citations. It uses facial expressions as indicators for impact of a publication.

• One way is to use the same variation of your name consistently throughout your academic career. If your name is a common name, add a middle name to distinguish yourself from other authors. Standardize your output to maximize your impact.
• Retain rights to your work in order to reuse your work to promote visibility and accessibility. Many publishers allow authors to retain some rights to their work. See Elsevier’s “What rights do I retain as a journal author?”
• If your work involves potential translational medicine applications, include a discussion of how the research could translate to clinical outcomes. “Impact of journal articles will be improved if they provide a direct line of reasoning for how findings might translate into useful information for real-world behaviors or technologies. This will enhance the probability that the article will affect public policy and thus increase its impact.” See “Publishing in the Psychological Sciences: Enhancing Journal Impact While Decreasing Author Fatigue.“
• Consider submitting your work to a journal that is currently indexed by PubMed. PubMed is a freely available citation database and citations are crawled by Google Scholar.

 
Interested in other strategies? See Strategies for Enhancing the Impact of Research.

Washington University School of Medicine’s Becker Medical Library is pleased to announce the launch of a new website, Assessing the Impact of Research. Realizing that now, more than ever, researchers need to be aware of the impact of their biomedical research, a team at the library has developed a Model for Assessment of Research Impact that provides a practical, do-it-yourself tool for tracking the post-publication effect/influence of that research. In addition to the Model, the site provides an in-depth analysis of the different kinds of research impact and their significance. Included are both guidance for quantifying and documenting research impact and resources for locating evidence of research impact. The website also includes strategies that investigators can utilize in order to enhance the diffusion of research output generated by a clinical or bench study.

For more information, contact Cathy Sarli of the Becker Medical Library.

1. Tenure
2. Progress reports
3. Identify similar research projects
4. Duplication or confirmation of research findings
5. Correction of research findings
6. Improvement of research findings
7. Extension of research (different human populations, different animal models or species, etc.)
8. Proper attribution/credit of research findings
9. Quantify return on investment for funding
10. Justification for future requests for funding
11. Demonstration of research impact
12. Identify potential collaborators for a future research project

Are you interested in learning how to track your research? See Who is Citing Your Work. This is a PPT tutorial that demonstrates four resources that authors can use to track their research: Google Scholar, SCOPUS, Web of Science and PubMed Faceoff. All resources are available to the Washington University School of Medicine community.