Research Impact

Scholarly metrics can be incredibly useful in illustrating the influence of your scholarly record, but if they are used carelessly or without context, they can become meaningless numbers. So what metrics should be used for what purposes? The following table gives an overview of different metrics, the dimensions of scholarship that they can help quantify, sample measures, and sources of these metrics. 

UMMS has access to Scopus through the Library. Productivity and Impact metrics can be found here for individual authors. 

• In Scopus, on the Author tab, search for the author by entering the last name and first initial of the person you are looking for. You can also search by ORCID number. 
• Identify the correct author from the search results. Scopus search results will return everyone in the database with the name you entered; scan the names to identify the correct author, or use the affiliation filter to refine your results.
• Select the author to view their author details. This page will give you an overview of the author’s publication history, including publication count, publication statistics such as the h-index, subjects, and a list of publications. 
• Click on Analyze Author Output (in the Documents by Author box) to view outputs in more detail. Here you can evaluate output by source, type, year, and subject area. You can also analyze citation counts by year and retrieve an h-index. 

These measures will reflect all of the content that is indexed in the Scopus database. Scopus includes all journals indexed in MEDLINE as well as a broader range of physical, life, and social sciences. (It typically has everything that you would find in PubMed.)

Collaboration

Try Scopus Author Analysis to see who your most frequent collaborators are.

Attention

Use Altmetric Explorer for Institutions (available to UMMS community) to discover the online attention your scholarship receives. 

Openness

Try Impact Story Profiles to determine the percentage of your outputs that are Open Access.

Broader Impact

Explore the Becker Model to see how broad your scholarly impact is. 

• Follow the norms of your discipline and institution when including metrics on your CV or APR; some frown on including h-indices or citation counts, some use them sparingly, others integrate them creatively to highlight the most impactful work in otherwise dense documents.
• Indicate the source database for quantitative metrics as some databases (IE: Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar) will produce different numbers based on the content they index.
• Always use qualitative and quantitative metrics together when telling the story of your scholarship.
• Look behind the numbers to see where and by whom your work is being cited or shared; this qualitative information is often more telling than a simple statistic.

Consult "Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics," published as a comment in Nature, for 10 principles that should guide research evaluation.