Library Guides: Research Impact: Home

Introduction to Research Impact

Definitions of research impact

Academic impact is "the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to academic advances, across and within disciplines, including significant advances in understanding, methods, theory and application"

Research Councils UK Pathways to Impact

Impact is the effect research has beyond academia and consists of " benefits to one or more areas of the economy, society, culture, public policy and services, health, production, environment, international development or quality of life, whether locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally" (paragraph 62) and as "manifested in a wide variety of ways including, but not limited to: the many types of beneficiary (individuals, organizations, communities, regions and other entities); impacts on products, processes, behaviors, policies, practices; and avoidance of harm or the waste of resources." (paragraph 63)

Higher Education Funding Council for England: 2014 REF: Assessment framework and guidance on submissions.

These two definitions were shared in the article below.

Research impact: a narrative review
Greenhalgh, T., Raftery, J., Hanney, S., & Glover, M. (2016). Research impact: a narrative review. BMC Medicine. 14(78).

Tools for Measuring Research Impact

Scopus This link opens in a new window
You can use Scopus to calculate the h-index for an individual author or a group of authors.
Scopus is an interdisciplinary, bibliographic database that indexes the contents of more than 29,000 journals in the physical sciences, engineering, earth and environmental sciences, life and health sciences, social sciences, psychology, business, and management.

Scopus also features cited references and can be searched for articles that cite a specific article.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
The h-index factor is based on the depth of your Web of Science subscription and your selected timespan.
Authoritative, multidisciplinary content covers over 10,000 of the highest impact journals worldwide, including Open Access journals and over 110,000 conference proceedings. You'll find current and retrospective coverage in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, with coverage available to 1900. Includes the Science Citation Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Web of Science is especially useful for its citation linking.

Publish or Perish Software
Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar and (since release 4.1) Microsoft Academic Search to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents metrics.

Impact Story: A tool to track your research impact

What is Impactstory?

A tool for finding the online impact of your research. Impactstory tracks mentions on Twitter, blogs, news outlets, and more. You can join for free using your ORCID. Learn more at https://impactstory.org.

Kudos: A tool to promote your research

What is Kudos?

Kudos is a free service for researchers to increase readership and the impact of your research. With the creation of your Kudos account and linking your author identifiers, like ORCID, you'll be able to share your work and retrieve multiple metrics relating to your publications including page views, citations, full text downloads, and social media metrics (alternative (alt) metrics).

Research Impact

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