Researchers and academic staff are often asked to demonstrate the impact of their research in applications for academic promotions, grant applications and in many other contexts.
Citation counts, journal impact factors, and h-index are considered standard tools for measuring the impact of research publications within academia. This is based on an assumption that significant research publications will have higher citation counts.
Limitations
The selection of the most appropriate metrics and/or the optimum method of presenting those metrics is dependent on the discipline, the purpose, the context, the specific research being evaluated, and so on. Therefore the library advises that you ensure that you understand fully the requirements of the grant, promotion, etc application. The following are all resources that you should consult to assist in deciding which metrics are appropriate for the specific purpose, and how to use those metrics to demonstrate research impact and engagement:
Support
The Library's Research Impact Library Advisory Service (RILAS) focuses on providing various research evaluation measures, including metrics, to University of Melbourne staff and researchers to support their research grant and academic promotion applications.
The specific metrics that are commonly used vary greatly in each discipline, along with the data sources and tools. The tabs on the left of this guide will link you to University of Melbourne guides created specifically for your discipline.
Further information
The use of metrics to demonstrate research impact or to compare researchers or research publications is a topic that has been debated much in recent years. The following websites and articles are recommended for further information and discussion:
There are multiple sources of metrics to demonstrate impact of research outputs. This guide provides step-by-step instructions and general guidance on a range of sources. It is important to note that the sources will differ markedly from discipline to discipline. Find below list of most commonly used sources of citation and bibliometric data:
| Source name | Description | Access |
|---|---|---|
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Scopus (Elsevier)
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Scopus is an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. Provides the following metrics using data from its own indexed sources:
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U of M licensed resource: http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/record=e1000421~S31 |
| SciVal (Elsevier) |
SciVal is used mostly to assess an institution’s research performance from a variety of perspectives, using data from Scopus. Using Overview module, individual researchers can obtain the following metrics:
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U of M licensed resource: http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/record=e1001547~S31 |
| Web of Science (Clarivate) |
Web of Science Core Collection provides access to authoritative, multidisciplinary content in over 12,000 journals worldwide, including Open Access journals and over 150,000 conference proceedings. Includes current and retrospective coverage in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, with coverage to 1900. Provides the following metrics using data from its own indexed sources:
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U of M licensed resource: http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/record=e1000043~S31 |
| InCites (Clarivate) |
InCites is an analytical tool built on Web of Science index and data. There are 3 components: Benchmarking and Analytics: a citation-based evaluation tool that can be used to benchmark output against peers and potential peers in a national or international context. Essential Science Indicators: compiles performance statistics and trends. Journal Citation Reports: evaluate and compare journals using citation data. |
U of M licensed resource:
http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/record=e1001628~S31
http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/record=e1001653~S31
http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/record=e1001652~S31
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|
Google Scholar |
Google Scholar searches across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. |
http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/record=e1001106~S31
|
| Publish or Perish |
Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations, using a variety of data sources (incl. Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search) to obtain the raw citations and then analyzes these.
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https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish |
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Altmetrics Explorer for Institutions |
Altmetric Explorer for Institutions captures hundreds of thousands of tweets, blog posts, news stories, policy documents and other content that mention scholarly articles.
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U of M licensed resource: http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au/record=e1001710~S31
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Citation counts, journal impact factors, and h-index are considered standard tools for measuring the impact of the research. This is based on an assumption that significant research output will have higher citation counts.
Limitations
Support
The Library's Research Impact Library Advisory Service (RILAS) focuses on providing various research evaluation measures, including metrics, to University of Melbourne staff and researchers to support their research grant and academic promotion applications.