Measuring Research Impact with Web of Science

Measuring a researcher's or an article's impact, influence and reach is tricky and will look different across disciplines and institutions. It's a good idea to rely on a wide variety of tools and measurements for analysing the amount that research has been cited in the scholarly literature or otherwise discussed on social media or in the popular press.

One traditional way of analysing a scholarly author's impact  or the impact of scholarly research outputs is to create a Web of Science citation report. Web of Science creates this by documenting instances of where peer reviewed research appears in its database and where it has received a citation in another scholarly source in its database. You can also create a Web of Science author report which includes the number of results found in the Web of Science database, the sum of the times cited, average citations per item and author's h-index .

The tool is not suitable for measuring the impact of creative work or for examining the impact of research beyond the scholarly literature. With those caveats in mind, it's an interesting exercise to create the reports to see how much, where and when an author or a piece of research has been cited. Google Scholar also offer Google Metrics, which claims to do the same thing. Pick your poison!



If you're interested in these types of metrics, MyRI offers a great 3-part module on measuring your research impact. They call it an open access toolkit and the module will introduce you to all kinds of tools.