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Demonstrating Research Impact for Grad Students

Michaela Willi Hooper

michaela.willihooper@oregonstate.edu

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Hui Zhang

hui.zhang@oregonstate.edu

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Why demonstrate research impact?

What audience do you want to reach?

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Make an impact

  • Make your research outputs available
    • ScholarsArchive@OSU
    • Disciplinary repositories
  • Promote and curate your Web presence
    • Social media
    • Google Scholar
    • ORCID
  • Publish your research in journals
    • Find high impact journals
    • Retain your rights to distribute!

Image: “nasa on the prowl for near earth objects.” nasa.gov

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Make your work available through ScholarsArchive

  • Conference papers
  • Posters
  • Preprints
  • Papers
  • Video
  • Code
  • Data
  • Teaching materials

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Works in ScholarsArchive have a permanent, stable handle you can share.

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Identify disciplinary/data repositories

  • AgEcon (Agriculture and Economics)
  • ArXiv (Physics, Math, Computer Science, Biology, Finance, Statistics)
  • CiteSeer (Computer and Information Science)
  • FigShare (Data)
  • GitHub (Code)
  • ICPSR (Social Sciences Data)
  • Repec (Economics)

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Share your work on social media

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Find and use relevant hashtags.

Share out your blog posts.

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Get your CV on the Web

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Claim your Google Scholar profile

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ORCID: disambiguate your research identity

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Other social media tools

  • Kudos (growkudos.com)
  • ImpactStory (impactstory.org)
  • ResearchGate
  • Mendeley
  • Academia.edu

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Choose the journal to reach your intended audience

  • Do your advisors recommend specific journals?
  • Are specific journals mentioned in tenure and promotion policies or grants that you might want to apply for?
  • Who is on the editorial board?
  • What are the submission guidelines?
  • Where is the research you read published?
  • Does it matter if your research is open access?
  • Impact factor can be gamed - look at other things as well.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_journal

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Impact Factor & Eigenfactor Score

Find it: Databases A-Z > InCites Journal Citation Reports

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Google Scholar Metrics

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Warning! Read publisher contracts carefully

Do they allow you to use/share your own work in the future?

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Image: “Pen to paper” by Marc Roberts. Used under CC BY-NC 2.0

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Demonstrate your impact with metrics

  • Journal-level metrics (impact factor, Eigenfactor score)
  • Author-level metrics (h-index)
  • Article-level metrics (downloads)
  • Altmetrics (social media mentions)

Author-level metrics

Article-level metrics

Journal-level metrics

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h-index

  • It is a one-number metric popularly used to quantify the productivity of a researcher
  • Major publishers and repositories all offer h-index such as: Google scholar, Web of Science, ResearchGate, and Scopus
  • But… it is tricky to understand how it is calculated

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h-index – How to Calculate?

  • Definition: …the number of papers with citation number higher or equal to h… (Hirsch, 2005)
  • In English: this author has published at least n papers that have each received at least n citations.

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h-index - Example

Articles

Citation numbers

1

10

2

9

3

6

4

3

5

2

h-index = 3

because three articles at least have three citations each

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h-index - Example

Articles

Citation numbers

1

10

2

9

3

6

4

4

5

2

h-index = 4

because four articles have at least have four citations each

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Altmetrics – Alternative Metrics

  • A suite of methods for measuring and tracking the impact of scholarly works with online sources and platforms
  • Social web changes scholarly communication
  • Altmetrics synonyms: Webometrics

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Types of Alternative Metrics

  • Usage
    • clicks, downloads, views, library holdings, video plays
  • Captures
    • bookmarks, code forks, favorites, readers, watchers
  • Mentions
    • blog posts, comments, reviews, Wikipedia links
  • Social Media
    • +1s, likes, shares, tweets
  • Citations
    • PubMed Central, Scopus, patents

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About Metrics. Plum Analytics (2016)

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Altmetrics vs. Bibliometrics

  • Altmetrics should be used as complement, not replacement, of citation analysis.
  • Altmetrics indicate public interest to the scholarly output, and popularity is not equal to quality
  • Altmetrics provide
    • Impacts from a broader context (e.g., non-peers, opinions, stories)
    • Quicker response comparing to citations
    • Incentive for open access publishing

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Questions?

Slides: http://bit.ly/2cKCvqc

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Visibility Guide:

http://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/visibility

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Altmetrics Guide:

http://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/altmetrics

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