Guide to Research Impact
A comprehensive guide to measuring and broadening your research impact from the librarians at the Yale University Library.
Research Impact
Understanding Research Impact: Introduction
Nowadays, it is not uncommon for employers, academic institutions, and funding agencies to ask for evidence of your research impact before making important decisions, such as tenure promotions, academic honors, or grant awards. Therefore as a researcher, it is important for you to understand what research impact is, what you can do to document, enhance, measure and present your research impact to those decision makers. This series of videos will help you understand various metrics of impact, and how you can enhance your research impact and tell better "impact stories".
Quantitative Metrics of Impact: Article Level
This video introduces the traditional quantitative metric of potential impact at the article level, the citation count, and altmetrics, which is a reaction to traditional bibliometrics. The video includes examples for each metric, and discusses their advantages and controversies.
Quantitative Metrics of Impact: Journal Level
This video looks at various journal-level metrics of research impact as reported in tools such as Thomson Reuter's Journal Citation Reports and Elsevier's Scopus.
Quantitative Metrics of Impact: Author Level
This video introduces quantitative metrics of research impact at the author level, especially the h-Index, its limitations, and the alternative metrics proposed to overcome the limitations.
Telling Impact Stories
This video introduces the Becker Model and how to use its list of indicators of impact to tell impact stories.
Visualizing Research Impact Data
This video introduces various databases and tools which provide visualization graphs based on citation data. It also describes the general process of visualizing research impact data if you are to generate your own visualization graphs.
Enhancing Research Impact: Name Disambiguation
Author and affiliation name disambiguation is a major issue in collecting and evaluating research impact data, so a good way to enhance your research impact is to make sure your name and affiliation is as unambiguous as possible. This video discusses the ambiguity problem itself, ways to mitigate the problem, and long-term solutions such as the adoption of a unique ID system for researchers, such as ORCID.
Enhancing Research Impact: Preparing the Manuscript
This video discusses the things you can do when preparing your manuscripts for publication to enhance your research impact, such as choosing a good title, writing a good abstract, assigning keywords, and choosing a journal to publish in.
Enhancing Research Impact: Sharing Your Research
Sharing your research work is very important in enhancing your impact. This video discusses the various ways to share and publicize different parts of the research work, such as manuscripts and data.