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Research Impact by
Research for research sake is no longer tenable or affordable; to be valuable to society, research must have impact! This textbook takes the reader on a journey from how the UK Research Excellence Framework assesses impact to real examples of outstanding research impact case studies. Along the way, Prof. Hugh McKenna describes and explains the case for research impact, the challenges, the link between research impact and evidence informed practice, achieving impact through changing policy and engaging with the public, how researchers can make their research findings more impactful and how research impact is assessment nationally and internationally It is written in an easily accessible and understandable style, with reflective exercises amply distributed throughout its pages and helpful guides helping to engage readers and notably health professionals who are often turned off by the normal heavy research tomes. This book makes the complex simple and the wearisome fascinating. The short chapters are interesting and authoritative and can be read on a 'standalone' basis, allowing readers to 'dip in and out'. From his experience in various countries, the author has a unique insight into what research impact is, how it is assessed and how and where research findings can have the most benefit. The stimulus for this book has been the excellent feedback that the author has received from health professionals, students and fellow researchers. There is always a risk that good knowledge and experience do not transfer well into a good textbook. In Research Impact: Guidance on Advancement, Achievement and Assessment, nothing has been lost in the transition. The book will be of great interest to many health researchers from nursing to midwifery, pharmacy, medicine or any allied health professional, but also to any research manager in all professions who want their research to bring positive change to society, culture, the economy, health and quality of life. It will be of particular interest to those who want to understand the difference between research impacts that are weak and those that are outstanding and how such assessments are made.
Publication Date: 2021
What are author metrics?
Author metrics are measures of the influence and productivity of an author or researcher. While not perfect, an author's impact is determined by several factors -- mainly, how often they are cited and what types of journals or publications they are cited in. Below please find an overview of the metrics that are currently being used to measure an author's research impact.
Author Citation Tracking
Citation tracking looks at the number of times a particular work or author have been cited in the bibliographies of other works. This gives some indication of how the author has been received by the academic community. Large numbers of citations are associated with greater impact and more influence.
By demonstrating where and how one's work has been cited, author citation metrics can:
- Identify key authors in a field
- Indicate an author's perceived value in that field
- Discover who is doing related work
- Track the published works of colleagues, collaborators or competitors
- Be used for purposes of hiring, tenure or promotion
Article and author level citation counts are available on Web of Science, Google Scholar, PLoS, BioMed Central and some discipline-specific databases.
Web of Science by 
provides citation counts for articles in more than 10,000 journals in the sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts. The journals that are indexed are typically the most consistently high impact titles in many disciplines. Web of Science Cited Reference Searching (video tutorial)
provides citation counts for articles found within Google Scholar. You will likely find more cited references because it is less selective in what it indexes and covers more journals and publication types than other databases. You must create a profile in Google Scholar to see the times your articles have been cited. Google Scholar Citations
Important Note: No single database will provide complete information about all of an author's citations. To get the most comprehensive count, it is best to check both Web of Science and Google Scholar since each database indexes different journals and publications.
h-Index
Proposed by J.E. Hirsch in 2005, the h-index is calculated through a formula that considers not only the number of publications but also the number of citations per publication. A measure of author influence, the h-index is the point where the number of articles published by an author intersects on a graph with the number of citations for each article. For example, an author with an h-index of 10 has published 10 papers that have been cited at least 10 times each. A complicated mathematical formula, the h-index is calculated for you in Web of Science. It is also available on Google Scholar if you have created a user profile.
Finding an author's H-Index in Web of Science (video tutorial)
Other Indices
g-index: Related to the h-index, the g-index is calculated based on the distribution of citations received by a given researcher's publication adding more weight to highly cited articles. Developed by Leo Egghe in 2006, the g-index centers on "Lotka’s Law". The premise of this law is that as the number of articles published increases, the authors producing that many publications decreases. The difference between the h and g index is that while the top h papers can have many more citations than the h-index would suggest, the g-index is the highest number g of papers that together received g2 or more citations. This means that the g-index score will be higher than that of the h-index.
i10-Index: A very simple measure, developed in 2011, the i10-index was introduced by and is used only by Google Scholar.
i10-Index = the number of publications with at least 10 citations
The i10-index measures an author's publications with at least 10 citations and your Google Scholar Profile page will include all of the documents that Google has indexed under your authorship, and i10-index information is listed at the top of the right hand column.
Publish or Perish (PoP)
Publish or Perish (PoP) from Harzing.com is a free software program that calculates numerous research metrics based on Google Scholar data. Once downloaded, this tool can calculate author metrics that include: total number of papers, total number of citations, average number of citations per paper, average number of citations per author, average number of citations per year, the h-index and related parameters, and the g-index. The goal of Publish or Perish "is designed to empower individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage."
Altmetrics
Altmetrics or alternative metrics are another way that researchers and authors can assess their impact. These non-traditional measures offer an alternative to the traditional citation impact metrics. Altmetrics tracks the attention that research outputs such as scholarly articles and datasets receive online. These statistics go beyond normal citation counts and pull data from: blogs, social media (Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, etc.), traditional news media (both mainstream and field specific) and online reference managers (Mendeley and CiteULike, etc.). 
There are both fee-based altmetric vendors (altmetric.com and plum analytics) and free altmetric sources (altmetrics.org) available online. Several publishers have started providing altmetric information on their platforms including BioMedPLOS, Nature Publishing Group, Ebsco and Elsevier Science Direct.
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