Assess Your Research Impact

Citation metrics are a type of quantitative measure that should be used to inform and complement, not replace, qualitative evidence. This guide includes some of the more common metrics you're likely to encounter, as well as their appropriate uses and limitations. Depending on your unique context, not all metrics will be relevant for your narrative, and no single metric will provide an accurate and comprehensive picture of your impact.

Below are key recommendations for responsible use of metrics by researchers and those responsible for assessing their work:

1. Consider each researcher's unique context.

Citation practices and patterns vary across disciplines, and early-career researchers have had less time to publish and receive citations for their work than senior researchers. Use normalized metrics to account for these differences.

2. Use a variety of metrics in your assessment.

No single metric will provide an accurate and comprehensive picture of a researcher's impact.

3. Gather metrics from variety of sources.

Each metrics tool or platform uses citation data from different sources, which can lead to different citation counts for the same article across platforms.

4. Quantitative metrics should not replace qualitative assessments.

Quantitative metrics cannot capture a researcher's full impact, and they can be misleading without context. They should be used to inform and complement qualitative assessment, not to replace qualitative assessment.

5. Choose appropriate metrics.

Journal-level metrics like the Journal Impact Factor should not be used to assess article quality or author impact.

6. Read the Declaration on Research Assessment and the Leiden Manifesto (linked below).

These statements describe best practices in research impact assessment, including appropriate use of metrics.

The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is set of recommendations to improve how scholarly research is evaluated. DORA has garnered widespread support from individual researchers, academic institutions, funders, publishers, and other research organizations. For authors and their institutions, the declaration recommends:

• Eliminating the use of journal-level metrics like the Journal Impact Factor in funding, hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions
• Assessing research on its own merits rather than on the basis of journals where research is published
• Exploring new indicators of significance and impact

Research evaluation is increasingly driven by data and not by expert judgement. To support researchers and those evaluating their work, five experts have proposed 10 principles for the measurement of research performance: the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics, published as a comment in Nature.