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Research Impact

This guide describes the different metrics and methods available to determine the impact of your research and scholarly work. This guide will also connect you with the library resources necessary to find, use, and understand the context of these metrics.

Basic Citation Metrics

Types

  • Total # of citations (of an article)
  • Yearly Average

Considerations

  • Field differences: depending on the field you work in, citations will take a different amount of time to accrue and occur at different rates.  
  • 2 year rule: In general, we recommend that citation metrics for articles published greater than two years prior to the analysis are stable and able to be analyzed.  For work that is less than two years old, the Highly Cited and Hot Papers designations in Web of Science (discussed below) can be used. 
     

Advanced Citation Metrics

Relative Citation Ratio

Web of Science Metrics

  • Highly Cited Papers
  • Hot Papers