Research Impact

UMass Chan faculty are required to use the guidance and forms from the Office of Faculty Affairs to complete Annual Performance Reviews. Additional, the Office provides consultations and assistance in preparing for promotion. Some best practices to follow in documenting your work:

• Indicate the source database for quantitative metrics as some databases, e.g., PubMed, Scopus, 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.
• Think broadly. Consider tracking products/outputs other than journal articles, e.g. collaborations, white papers, conference presentations, blog posts, etc.
• Consider impact from your teaching and mentorship including number and reach of student papers and presentations, data from student evaluations, etc.

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. 

UMass Chan 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, topics, and a list of publications. 
• Click on Analyze Author Output (located under the "Document & Citation Trends" graph) 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.)

The impact of one's research can be tracked and demonstrated beyond traditional citation metrics, i.e., the number of publications authored and/or the number of times an article is cited. The Metrics Overview table details dimensions of impact and the tools available to locate them. Additionally, there are any number of outputs that indicate research impact. Licenses, patents, outreach and instructional materials, and much more can all be used as indicators of the reach and impact of research. 

The Becker Medical Library (Washington University Saint Louis) Model for Assessment of Research Impact is a framework for tracking the dissemination and impact of research outputs. It provides a detailed list of impact indicators and definitions by pathways including Advancement of Knowledge, Clinical Implementation, Community Benefit, Legislation and Policy, and Economic Benefit.

These blog posts present ideas for including research impact metrics on your biosketch and in grant proposals.