Skip to Main Content
Main Library & McBay Science Library
Display of Opening hours
Hours
Main Library 7:30am – 2:00am
Circulation Desk 7:30am – 2:00am
Digital Humanities Lab 7:30am – 2:00am
Interlibrary Loan Office 8:00am – 5:00pm
Reference Desk 9:00am – 10:00pm
View all Hours
All Library Hours
Search Borrow & Request Research & Teaching Support Services Libraries & Collections Study Spaces & Tech About Ask Us! Chat & More ☰

Research Impact: Overview and Introduction to Research Metrics

Understanding Research Impact

 

What is research impact?

Research impact can be considered in two ways:

1. The impact that an author (or group of authors), journal, or article/book/book chapter has on the scholarly conversation.

2. The impact that that an author (or group of authors), journal, or article/book/book chapter has on society outside of the academy. This includes economic benefit, societal benefit, and cultural benefit and impact can happen on the local, national, or international level.

Why might a researcher or university administrator want to understand the impact of their research or the research produced at their university?

Researchers may want to understand the impact their research has for:

  • Application for promotion or tenure
  • Applying for grant funding or quantifying ROI for grant renewals or progress reports
  • Identifying potential research collaborators

Administrators may want to understand the impact of research conducted by faculty at their college or university for:

  • Increasing their college or university's position in national or international rankings

How is research impact measured?

Research metrics offer a quantitative view of the impact of researchers and their outputs. Descriptions of metrics to assess researcher impact, journal impact, and article/book/book chapter impact are discussed in greater detail on each tab of this guide. 

What are some limitations to be aware of when using research metrics?

It is important to be aware that quantitative measure of impact can overestimate or underestimate the impact of a researcher, journal, or publication. And no single metric can capture the impact of a researcher, journal, or publication. 

  • Citations take time to accrue, so an older article may have more citations than a newer one but may be less impactful.
  • Citation practices differ between disciplines. Comparing citations between two articles or two researchers is less helpful if comparing between articles or researchers in different disciplines.
  • Self-citation is sometimes necessary, but self-citation or citation through citation rings can inflate article impact metrics and journal impact metrics. 
  • Because citation count serves as the basis for journal impact metrics, they are useful for understanding the reputation of journal within its field. Because citation practices vary between fields, they are not as useful when used to compare the impact of journals outside of their fields.

When using research metrics, it is important to match the appropriate research metric to the question of interest and to utilize research metrics in a responsible way as part of an overall evaluation of research impact that includes qualitative measures like peer review. The Responsible Use of Research Metrics tab has more information on this issue as well as suggested resources.

Tools for Measuring Research Impact

The tabs on this guide offer guidance on impact metrics for researchers, journals, and publications as well as tools for measuring impact. Listed below are three tools that offer broad measures of research impact. They may be good places to start when thinking about quantitative measures of research impact.

  • SciVal - Sign-in required using UGA SSO

Produced by Elsevier and based on data in the Scopus article database, this research intelligence tool allows users to compare the research performance of people, groups of people, or institutions. It allows allows users to identify research trends and potential research collaborators.

 An open access successor to Microsoft Academic Graph, OpenAlex allows researchers to obtain various metrics on researchers, institutions, and research outputs (e.g., publications or datasets). OpenAlex's strength are in its indexing of diamond open access publications, its global focus, and the breadth of research outputs it indexes.

Google Scholar is a freely available search engine for scholarly literature produced by Google as part of its suite of web search tools. Using a familiar single search box format, Google Scholar allows users to obtain citation metrics for a variety of peer-reviewed publication types as well as links to versions of those publications. Users who create profiles can track author impact metrics.

Produced by Clarivate, this article database allows users to search for documents or for researchers and returns article impact metrics and author impact metrics as well as links from citations to article indexed in the database.