Scholarly Communication & Publishing: Impact Factors

Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) is a non-profit organization developed to alleviate the problem of name ambiguity in research.

The ORCID organization provides a unique identifier that researchers can use to point to works they have created or are associated with.

The researcher has complete control of how and where to use their identifier.

ORCID Website

How Impact Factors are Calculated: 

Example taken from Nursing Research's 2011 impact factor: 

Articles published in 2010 that were cited in 2011: 63

Articles published in 2009 that were cited in 2010: 94

63+94=157

Total number of articles published in 2010: 61

Total number of articles published in 2009: 51

61+51=112

157 / 112 = 1.402 impact factor

Altmetrics,  or "alternative metrics" are a measure of research dissemination and an indicator of impact, combining traditional impact factors and measures with emerging and evolving methods of scholarly dissemination, such as views and downloads from social media sites. 

*Like any metric, there is a potential to "game the system" by artificially inflating metrics to show more use and dissemination than what is occurring naturally. 

 H-Index

The H-index captures output based on the total number of publications and the total number of citations to those works.

More information on H-Index here

H- Index can be useful for

• Comparing researchers of similar career length.
   
• Comparing researchers in similar field, subject, or Department, and who publish in the same journal categories.

H- Index is NOT useful for

• Comparing researchers from different fields, disciplines, or subjects.
   
• Assessing fields, departments, and subjects where research output is typically books or conference proceedings as they are not well represented by databases providing H-indices.

You can find your H-Index at Web of Science or Google Scholar.

In Web of Science, search for the author's name in the search box. Use the drop down to the right of the search box to select author.  If all of the articles in the returned search results are applicable, select "create citation report". An H-index will be calculated, along with other useful statistics. Hint: You may need to search using the full name of the author, but also first and/or first and middle initial and last name of the author to find all articles. 

If not all citations returned are applicable (there may be some articles written by authors with the same or very similar names and/or initials), check the box next to the search result number(s) of the articles you wish to include and click "add to marked list".  Once the list is complete, click on "marked list", then select create citation report. 

The assessment of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is based on a combination of impact and influence metrics, and citation data from the Web of Science 

This is a proprietary product of Clarivate Analytics, formerly Thomson Reuters. 

JCR helps to measure research influence and impact at the journal and category levels, and shows the relationship between citing and cited journals.

You can explore JCR here