Research Impact Indicators & Metrics

To enhance your research impact:

• Choose your publishers carefully, selecting publishers that facilitate accurate research sharing by assigning Digital Object Identifiers and using ORCID.
• Retain copyright to maintain decision making power over your work. Use our guide to assist you. 
• Publish Open Access to reach readers with limited access to subscription journals.
• Take advantage of the UMass Open Access policy.
• Upload your works to UMass ScholarWorks, our institutional repository. See our guide for help uploading. 
• Use identifiers (DOIs) to ensure reliable permanent links to your publications.
• Incorporate your grant ID # in publications and datasets to track citations and downloads of your outputs.
• Publish/deposit data, with their own identifiers to track their use, visit AAU's Data Access guide to learn more.
• Consider exploring the 30 Day Impact Challege.

Creating and updating author profiles and sharing works on multiple platforms creates visibility for readers with different platform preferences and increases the likelihood your work will be discovered in searches

• Create an ORCiD profile to connect your publications and affiliations and distinguish yourself from other researchers.
• Create your Google Scholar profile to help yourself appear in top hits for Google searches for your work.
• Create a Mendeley profile to connect your publications and track metrics associated with them.
• Claim your Web of Science ResearcherID to make changes to your scholar profile in Clarivate products including Publons.
• Check your automatically generated Scopus Author Profile to ensure that your preferred name, affiliation, and publications are associated with your profile. 
• Share your work in Zotero.
• Consider whether or not to create profiles on ResearchGate or Academia.edu, knowing that they are proprietary sites and you cannot control the ways they use your information.

Google Scholar profiles track citations of your work and calculate an H-index for you. Learn more about the H-index on the Author Metrics page. Google Scholar's calculations are based on a very broad set of publications including grey literature such as conference presentations.

Web of Science tracks citations of your work in WOS indexed publications and calculates an H-index for you. Different platforms will show different H-indices based on the set of publications they use for calculations. Learn more about using citation metrics responsibly on the Apply Metrics Responsibly page. 

Scopus tracks citations of your work in Scopus indexed publications and calculates an H-index for you. Different platforms will show different citation counts and H-indices because they evaluate your research and citations based on different sets of publications.