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Measuring and Broadening Your Research Impact

h- index

-from Wikipedia

The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index can also be applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal[1] as well as a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country.[2] The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UCSD, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality[3] and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.

Citation Counts

Citation counts measure the impact of a publication or author by counting the number of times either is cited by other works.  Although this sounds simple, it is complicated by the fact that there is no single citation analysis source that covers all publications and their cited references.  Additionally, some disciplines and publications are covered in much more depth than others.This section introduces the sources available to the NMSU community for performing citation analysis. 

Apart from use in evaluating a researcher or research group's impact, citation searching and analysis may be used to determine who has influenced areas of research (who are the "major players"), what are the emerging areas of research, and who might be potential collaborators.

To Note: Web of Science has an alerting system that you may set up to notify you whenever one of your research outputs that is indexed in WoS gets cited. See the Tutorials page of this guide for instruction in setting up an alert.

Other measures of research impact and esteem

The following factors may provide additional evidence of research impact and/or research capacity. These measures may be relevant for competitive grant applications and academic promotions.

  • Conference Publications
  • International engagement
  • Influence on industry/government/public policy/community/cultural organizations
  • Successfully acquitted research grants
  • Successfully acquitted research projects
  • Awards and Prizes
  • Holdings in Libraries
  • Partnerships
  • Editorships
  • Research Fellowships
  • Membership of Learned Academy
  • Membership of Statutory Committee
  • Patents
  • Research Commercialization Income