Measuring your research impact: Getting Started

Getting Started

Author Impact

H-index

G-index

i10-index

Journal Impact

Journal Citation Reports (JCR)

Eigenfactor and Article Influence

Scimago Journal and Country Rank

Google Scholar Metrics

Tracking and Measuring Your Impact

Web of Science Citation Tools

Google Scholar Citations

PLoS Article-Level Metrics

Publish or Perish

Author Disambiguation

Broadening Your Impact

This guide details various ways of measuring research impact, particularly through traditional means of publishing and citation.  Before you begin to delve into the various citation metrics, we recommend you do the following three things:

• Sign up for an ORCID Identifier:  The Open Researcher Community ID is an increasingly recognized persistent digital identifier.  The unique number assigned to you will allow publishers and aggregators of scholarly literature to distinguish you from researchers with similar names.  This is a powerful tool in author disambiguation and it takes just a few minutes to sign up. Go to orcid.org and follow the instructions to register for your ORCID identifier or to connect an existing ORCID account to your Cornell NetID. Have questions?  Contact orcid-help@cornell.edu or visit ORCID@Cornell guide for more information about getting started
• Get a ResearcherID with Web of Science:  A ResearcherID can be linked to your ORCID number and facilitates citation metrics and publication tracking using Web of Science tools.  With a ResearcherID, you will be included in the Web of Science author index allowing other researchers to learn more about your work and affiliations.  
• Create a Google Scholar Citations Profile:  Google scholar citations allows authors to track citations to their scholarly works and to calculate numerous citation metrics based on Google Scholar citation data.  By setting up a profile, you will be able to disambiguate yourself from authors with the same or similar names.  For more information, see the Google Scholar page in this Library Guide.

This guide walks you through some of the most common indexes used to quantify scholarly impact.  Your discipline(s) may place more importance on one index over the others.  Regardless of the index that you are the most familiar with, this situation comes to mind:

Comic above courtesy of XKCD