Measuring Your Research Impact: Overview of Research Metrics

This guide presents the tools that are available to measure the quantitative and qualitative impact of research; as well as how to track researcher impact.

Questions about Research Metrics?

Potentially, any database with citations could create bibliometric measures. Each database that offers bibliometric measures primarily uses its own unique data, journals, authority files, indexes, and subject categories. Citation behaviour varies between disciplines as one discipline is different to another.

There is currently no overarching tool across databases.

Further reading: The diverse world of citation indexing services

Quantitative methods such as citation counts, journal impact factors and researcher specific metrics, such as the h-index, provide a means of measuring research impact.

These research metrics can be used:

• to support applications for grant funding
• to support applications for promotion
• by a researcher to maintain their own research profile
• in a Department and for Faculty reviews

Data that is used for measuring research impact includes: Researcher metrics Number of times a researcher is cited Number of publications Article Metrics Number of times an article is cited Using Altmetrics, such as page views, downloads and blog post about an article Journal metrics Number of articles published in a journal each year Number of journals in a subject area Cited half-life of journals

Browman, H.I. & Stergiou, K.I. (Eds.). (2008). Use and misuse of bibliometrics indices in evaluating scholarly performance. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, 8(1).

Howard, J. (2012). Tracking Scholarly Influence Beyond the Impact Factor. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 28/02/2012.

Hunt, G. E. (2011), Making sense of bibliometrics. Acta Neuropsychiatrica, 23: 80–81. 

Mutz, R. & Daniel, H.(2012).Skewed citation distributions and bias factors: Solutions to two core problems with the journal impact factor. Journal of Informetrics, 6(2): 169–176.

Public Policy Group, LSE. (2011). Maximizing the impacts of your research: a handbook for social scientists.  London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

Sula, C. (2012). Visualizing Social Connections in the Humanities: Beyond Bibliometrics. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 38(4): 31-35.

The MyRI bibliometrics toolkit includes a series of videos outlining the uses and limitations of bibliometrics in evaluating research impact.

LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog, a blog that share best practice on research and keeps the research community up to date with events and new developmens in this area.