Getting Started

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. Have questions?  Please see our ORCiD Libguide or contact orcid-help@cornell.edu, and read more about ORCID.
  • Get a ResearcherID with Web of Knowledge:  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 Knowledge author index allowing other researchers to learn more about your work and affiliations.

Navigating the world of bibliometrics

The Measuring Your Research Impact LibGuide 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 graphic may resonate with you:

XKCD comic. Title reads: How Standards Proliferate:(see A/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc.) First panel text: Situation: There are 14 competing standards. Second panel, two figures speaking to each other. "14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases." "Yeah!" Third panel text" Soon: Situation: there are 15 competing standards.

Comic above courtesy of XKCD