Navigating the world of bibliometrics
The Measuring Your Research Impact guide walks you through some of the most common indexes used to quantify scholarly impact. Whether author impact or journal impact, it is important to remember that none are perfect. 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 courtesy of XKCD
Research Impact
There are several 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 and follow the instructions to register for your identifier or to connect an existing ORCID account to your Cornell NetID. Have questions? Contact orcid-help@cornell.edu or visit this 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.
To learn more about citation metrics, visit the Measuring Your Research Impact Library Guide.
Get started with ORCiD
ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and ensures that your work is recognized by linking you to your professional activities.
Here's how to get started with ORCID:
- Get your ORCID iD. Register at orcid.org, using your Cornell email address.
- Add your works. Once you've created your ORCID iD, you can add your scholarly works, enable updates, and more!
- Use your ORCID iD. Include it on your web pages, publications, grant applications, and anywhere else you want to distinguish yourself and your works!
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