Scholarly Impact Metrics
What is My Scholarly Impact and Why is it Important?
Scholarly impacts are a means of quantifying to measure the overall influence of research. Scholarly impact is assessed by using many different types of metrics, including the number of times a piece of research is cited, how often a journal is cited, or if the work has been discussed on social media or the news, among others. This guide will outline the many metrics that exist, how they are measured, and why they are important for Seton Hall University’s teaching and research faculty.
Resources to Get Started
Check out the following resources to see how scholarly metrics are collected and measured across different platforms. See the section “Impact Metrics” for more definitions and details.
"Publication Metrics" by Conklin & Oermann (2017) [HTML]
"Are you familiar with the metrics used to describe the impact of journals and your work? How are others using your articles in their own research, teaching, and clinical practice? The goal of this article is to describe various publication metrics and how to access them. One way to categorize these metrics is by journal, article, and author" (Conklin & Oermann 2017, para. 1).
The Metrics Toolkit is a resource for researchers and evaluators that provides guidance for demonstrating and evaluating claims of research impact.
"While research metrics may seem well established in the scholarly landscape, it can be challenging to understand how they should be used and how they are calculated. The Metrics Toolkit is an online evidence-based resource for researchers, librarians, evaluators, and administrators in their work to demonstrate or assess the impact of research" (Champieux et al. 2018, para. 1).
Assess article and author influence by using Google Scholar to review citation counts, view h-index numbers, and other metrics.
Considered the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research.
“An Overview on Evaluating and Predicting Scholarly Article Impact” by Bai et al. (2017)
"Scholarly article impact reflects the significance of academic output recognized by academic peers, and it often plays a crucial role in assessing the scientific achievements of researchers, teams, institutions and countries. It is also used for addressing various needs in the academic and scientific arena, such as recruitment decisions, promotions, and funding allocations. This article provides a comprehensive review of recent progresses related to article impact assessment and prediction. The review starts by sharing some insight into the article impact research and outlines current research status. Some core methods and recent progress are presented to outline how article impact metrics and prediction have evolved to consider integrating multiple networks. Key techniques, including statistical analysis, machine learning, data mining and network science, are discussed. In particular, we highlight important applications of each technique in article impact research. Subsequently, we discuss the open issues and challenges of article impact research. At the same time, this review points out some important research directions, including article impact evaluation by considering Conflict of Interest, time and location information, various distributions of scholarly entities, and rising stars" (Bai et al. 2017, para. 1).