Scholarly Communication and Research Commons: Impact

Research impact is “the influence scholarly and creative enquiry has upon wider society, intended as well as unintended, immediate as well as protracted” (Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences).

There are several steps you can take to improve dissemination of your research and increase your research impact:

• Publish in an open access journal – freely available research has a greater impact
• Manage your online identity, such as by using author identifiers
• Track your metrics to determine what audience is interested in your research
• Use Twitter or other social media tools to publicize your research. See this guide to social media for academics.

The Library’s guide to Research Metrics outlines some of the key ways to assess impact by author, journal, or article.

• Journal Citation Reports outline the impact factor of individual journals
• SciVal allows you to assess your and your colleagues’ research impact

Altmetrics are alternative metrics based on open online sources and can also be tracked to assess impact.

Persistent researcher identifiers allow the impact of a researcher to be accurately tracked.

• ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a free author registry
• ResearcherID uses Web of Science to track author metrics
• Scopus Author ID uses Scopus to manage publication lists
• Google Scholar Citations tracks article citations via Scholar