Research Impact Challenge: Day 4

Research metrics, also known as bibliometrics, are one important tool among many to capture elements of research productivity and impact.

Why research metrics matter to your research impact

Research metrics help tell the story of your research career and provide a way to demonstrate your impact to new audiences. In the post-secondary sector, common assessment activities that incorporate research metrics can include:

• Individual peer review of funding applications
• Individual assessment for promotion and tenure
• Grants and awards
• University rankings

There are many different ways to measure your impact, like:

Today we will focus on the appropriate uses of individual level research metrics.

When should I use individual level research metrics? 

You should use individual research metrics to :

• Conduct a person-level analysis, intended for an individual researcher to gain a personal understanding of their research output and impact examples.
• Highlighting highly cited documents in advancement packages, funding competitions, or awards applications.

You should not use individual metrics to:

• Comparing individual researchers solely based on h-index data.
• Performance measurement to compare between researchers for personnel decisions, including hiring, merit review, and tenure.
• Comparing research output among individual researchers, such as those from different disciplines or fields, at different stages of career, or with different research foci. 
• Comparing women researchers’ cited works with men as there is a known bias.
• Using measures to compare areas that are not robust or well captured in citation-tracking databases. For example, regional and interdisciplinary disciplines, or fields where books or conference proceedings are the primary forms of research output.
• Compare metrics from different data sources

What are altmetrics?

For stakeholders interested in the broad influence of scholarly outputs, altmetrics may offer insight by calculating an output's reach, social relevance, and attention from a given community, which may include members of the public sphere (Outputs of the NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics Project, section 1).

While traditional bibliometrics measure research impact using citation counts in academic journals, altmetrics aim to measure the impact of scholarly research based on a variety of different factors, including:

• Citations in government reports
• Social media mentions
• Mainstream media coverage
• Blog discussions
• And more

Where can I find altmetric data?

The three main providers of altmetric data include:

• Altmetric.com
  • A product of Digital Science
• Impactstory
  • A product of Our Research
• PlumX
  • A product of Elsevier