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About Impact Data
Why is Impact Data important?
- Impact data on publications and other research outputs of individuals, research groups or institutions, is one factor that is used to secure funding for further research and may be used by individuals to secure tenure or gain promotion
- Impact, or citation, data may be used by authors to quantify their own impact within or beyond a discipline, and by other researchers to identify competitors or collaborative opportunities within a field
- Common measures of research output include the total number of papers, total number of citations, and the number of citations per paper. Each of these measures has advantages and disadvantages, related to discipline characteristics, inclusiveness of the measures, and the accessibility of the data.
- Impact vs Quality debate continues - are quantitative measures of research performance superior to qualitative measures?
Impact Data about Researchers
Number of Times Cited (or Downloaded)
The Library subscribes to a number of databases that provide quality citation data about individual papers. That is, these databases show whom has cited an original paper, when and where, providing an opportunity to learn about other researchers within or related to a discipline as well as illustrating "impact" of that paper.
UTAS ePrints |
Our institutional repository can identify "downloads" for any individual items it contains, as well as showing the breadth of countries where these have occurred. This is useful indicator of a researcher's impact on peers as well as the broader community, as ePrints content is searchable using publicly available search tools such as Google.
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This is a multi-discipline index of peer-reviewed, high-impact journals and is a key source of citation data, which enables an author of a cited article to analyse the impact of their research ie to see how it is being used to influence and support current research. Additionally, the database offers Cited Reference searching, enabling tracking of citation activity for books, conference papers and journal articles not otherwise indexed by Web of Science.
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This indexes multi-discipline peer-reviewed sources, including journal articles, conference proceedings and trade publications. Citation data may be downloaded and analysed for individual authors using Citation Tracker. |
Citation data is a feature commonly being added to many databases now. See your Subject Guide for databases relevant to your research discipline and peruse their news announcements, tutorials or help guides to learn if citation features are present and how to use them See also Research Databases for further information about citation indexes..
Increasingly, there are web sources of citation data too. See Google Scholar and Web Citation Index. Like UTAS ePrints, these sources may reflect impact beyond the discipline, demonstrating the influence of specific research on government initiatives, for example. In-Cites is a web-based Thomson database that identifies trends in research, profiling high-performing institutions and highly cited scientists.
H-Index, G-Index, HC-Index and others
Analysis of citation data, rather than just its collection, has become a value-added service of some databases now.
- h-index
- Measures impact / research contribution of individual or group of researchers
- h-index of 15, for example, means that there are 15 items that have been cited 15 or more times
- Value will only increase over period of researcher/s career
- Can only compare h-indices of researchers in same field
- Through its Citation Tracker, Scopus will calculate and graphically represent the h-index for individual authors, where papers have been published since 1995.
- In Web of Science, the Citation Report includes the h-index
- g-index
- Introduced as an improvement of the h-index which "is insensitive to one or several outstandingly highly cited papers" (Egghe, 2006, p.132)
- Measures the global citation performance of set of articles
- If set is ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received (together) at least
 citations.
- a set of papers has a g-index of g if g is the highest rank, such that the top g papers have, together, at least citations
- contemporary h-index (hc-index)
- based on the h-index, with an age-related weighting to each cited article
- The computer programme, Publish or Perish, analyses data from Google Scholar to derive the h-index, g-index and average numbers of citations per author, paper, year etc. Compare these data with those for the same author(s), found in Scopus and Web of Science.
- Keep up-to-date with new or alternate measures of impact, via your Liaison Librarian or Library Blog .
How to increase the impact of your research
- Publish in an open-access repository (OAR), starting with UTAS ePrints. Learn more about OARs.
- Submit articles for publication in high-impact, and / or peer-reviewed sources.
- Aim to publish in sources that are esteemed within your discipline, according to the Publication Reference Types e.g. A1
Refereed article in a scholarly journal or
B1. Authored Book - research. See Publication Entry System (PES), Reference Material (Section 3) for more reference types.
Selected literature on sources of impact data
Brody, T 2006, 'Evaluating Research Impact through Open Access to Scholarly Communication', PhD thesis, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
Egghe, L 2006, 'Theory and practise of the g-index', Scientometrics, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 131-152, DOI 10.1007/s11192-006-0144-7,
Harzing, A-W 2007, Publish or Perish, 2.1.2747 edn, Harzing.com, Melbourne
Hirsch, JE 2005, 'An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 102, no. 46, pp. 16569-16572,
Impact Factors for Journals
What are Impact Factors and how may they be used?
- Impact Factors are a statistical measure of a journal's influence and impact on the global research community
- Journals may be referred to as "high-impact", based on their impact factor ranking
- View and interpret impact factors for individual journal titles, relative to other titles within the discipline rather than in isolation
Use Impact Factors to
- identify highly ranked journals to read and in which to publish
- confirm the status of journals in which you have published
- identify journals relevant to your research
Impact Factors of journals are often used as a factor in deciding allocations of public funding for research
How can I find Impact Factors and how are they calculated?
A. The traditional source of impact factors is Thomson ISI's Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
- The impact factor is:
- the average number of times that articles published in a specific journal in the two previous years (e.g. 2000-01)
- were cited in a particular year (i.e. 2002)
- Impact Factors may be obtained for individual journals or for all journals within a subject category or edition within the Journal Citation Reports.
- See Helpsheet for Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
B. A new free source of journal impact data is SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR)
- Information is extracted from Elsevier's Scopus database
- The coverage period of country and journal indicators is from 1996 to the end of 2007
- SCImago Algorithm is based on Google PageRank
Read a comparison of JCR and SJR in Biomed Central Blog
C.The Eigenfactor offers a free alternative to journal ranking, based on the network created by citations and footnotes. The Eigenfactor score of a journal is an estimate of the percentage of time that library users spend with that journal.
Are Impact Factors available for all journals?
- Not all disciplines are covered equally within Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
- JCR's Science edition includes over 5900 journals
- JCR's Social Science edition includes over 1700 journals
- SCImago covers the 15,000+ titles indexed by Scopus and reflects the subject coverage of this database:
- Life Sciences >3,400 titles
- Health Sciences > 5,300 titles (including 100% coverage of Medline titles)
- Physical Sciences > 5,500 titles
- Social Sciences > 2,850 titles
- Alternative rankings of journals or sources of impact data may exist in your research area - contact your Liaison Librarian to enquire
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