Research Impacts Using Citation Metrics

This guide introduces resources that describe, utilize, and support the current research landscape. 

Considerations of the roles of author, content, sources, impact, reputation, rankings, and benchmarking are increasingly important in analyzing contributions to the research life cycle.

Information here is organized by the different methods of impact that the research landscape is defined by:

Author Impact

Article Impact

Journal/Source Impact 

Institutional Impact 

Tools are promoted that can be used to engage in research metrics. An overview of 28+ resources that use research metrics is found in The Metrics Toolkit.  Since the landscape is constantly changing, Emerging Metrics are also explored. For basic information on the Science Information Lifecycle visit this tutorial.

In addition, the Subject Guide for Social Media applications to support research is now completed.  This will help you share your research findings via different social media tools.

Some recommended methods of research impact and citation metrics are detailed in the pages of this guide:

Web of Science Citation Report (Author Impact)

Google Scholar Author Profile (Author Impact)

H-Index (Author Impact)

Altmetrics (Article Impact)

Web of Science Cited Reference Search (Article Impact)

Journal Citation Reports Impact Factor (IF) (Journal Impact)

Eigenfactor (Journal Impact)

This Guide was initially prepared by Laine Thielstrom (thielstrom@gmail.com) during her Library School internship at the San Jose State University Graduate School of Library & Information Science, and was conducted at the University of California, Irvine Libraries in Fall 2012.  Additional revision to the guide is an ongoing effort at keeping it current.  Any errors are those of the current editor.  Please share information to keep accurate.