Research Guides: Library Research Guide for Graduate Students in Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences: Scholarly Impact

Related Guides

Scholarly Impact and Citation Analysis
This guide provides information on resources and research methods involved in conducting citation analysis. (CFAES Wooster Campus Research Library)
Measuring your research impact: Broadening your impact
This guide provides an introduction to the various metrics used to measure researcher and journal impact. (Cornell University Library)

Scholarly Impact

Why you should care about your scholarly impact:

To make your research activities known,
To increase the chance of your publications being cited,
To ensure attribution, names and affiliations are correct,
To receive credit for your works in research assessments,
To increase the chance of new contacts for research collaborations,
To increase the chance of funding,
To serve society better.

To document and analyze your scholarly impact:

Find out citation counts and who is citing your work with a Cited Reference Search using Google Scholar, Scopus, or Web of Science Core Collection.
Determine the impact factors and rankings of the journals in which you've published with Journal Rankings.
Monitor downloads, views, and discussion of your work on social media using Altmetrics.

Improving Your Citation Metrics

There are general steps you can take to improve your citation metrics:

Be consistent in the way you use your name as an author and your affiliation.
Create an ORCID and register your author profiles in ORCID which provides a persistent digital identifier which unambiguously link publications to you.
Monitor and manage your author profiles in Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science to be sure all your articles are included
- If you have a compound name, make sure the database enters it correctly
- If you have a common name, create profiles in the databases to record your publications
- Make your Google Scholar profile public, so that others can see your publications.
Publish in journals that are covered by indexing services and Google Scholar and avoid journals that aren't well-indexed.
Publish in open access journals or grant open access rights (when available) to make your work accessible to those without subscriptions.
Share an early version of your work as pre-print (bioRxiv, agriRxiv, SocArXiv, ArXiv, SSRN etc.).
Deposit a copy of your work in the Knowledge Bank or other authorized repositories to increase visibility

Setting Up Citation Alerts

Many databases let you set up an alert to notify you when an article has been cited. In most cases, you will need to set up an account to use the service.

Web of Science

Perform a search in one of the Web of Science citation databases
When viewing a Full Record, click the "Create Citation Alert" button
Alerts are active for one year and may be renewed.

Scopus

On the Document details page, click Set citation alert or Set citation feed box.
Fill out the Set document citation alert form to receive automatic notifications.

Google Scholar

Locate the article you want to track by searching Google Scholar.
Click on "Cited by" link following article citation.
Click on "Create alert" from display of citing articles.
Enter your email address to receive the alerts

Journal Rankings

Google Scholar Metrics
Google Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics summarize recent citations to many publications, to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research. To get started, you can browse the top 100 publications in several languages, ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. To see which articles in a publication were cited the most and who cited them, click on its h-index number to view the articles as well as the citations underlying the metrics.
InCites Journal Citation Reports
The Journal Citation Reports module within InCites allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from approximately 12,000 scholarly and technical journals and conference proceedings from more than 3,300 publishers in over 60 countries/regions.
Scopus CiteScore Metrics
CiteScore metrics from Scopus are comprehensive, transparent, current and free metrics for serial titles in Scopus.

Useful Tools

Open Researcher Community ID (ORCID)
ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.
Google Scholar Profile
Google Scholar offers a popular way to create a profile that showcases your own papers and the citations they’ve received. It also calculates a platform-dependent h-index. click the “My Citations” link at the top of the page to get your account setup started.
Scopus Author Profile
Scopus Profiles are created by a powerful algorithm that groups documents with a high-level of certainty to a unique Author number. Enter an author search in the Scopus database and click on the highlighted name in the results list. The profile provides a publications overview, various analyses such as the h-index, and a unique Author ID.
ResearcherID
ResearcherID provides a solution to the author ambiguity problem within the scholarly research community. Each member is assigned a unique identifier to enable researchers to manage their publication lists, track their times cited counts and h-index, identify potential collaborators and avoid author misidentification. In addition, your ResearcherID information integrates with the Web of Knowledge and is ORCID compliant, allowing you to claim and showcase your publications from a single one account.
Harzing's Publish or Perish
PoP is a free software tool that retrieves and analyzes citation data. It uses a variety of data sources to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents a range of citation metrics, including the number of papers, total citations and the h-index.