Research Impact & Support

Impact data is used to evaluate the relative importance of a journal, an individual publication, or a researcher to a field of study. Tools used to measure  impact, include journal impact factors, citations to publications, and the h-index of researchers.

Limitations in the use of bibliographic metrics to measure researcher impact

• The number of times a paper is cited is not necessarily a measure of quality
• Measurement tools may favor specific types of scholarly communication and / or do not include different types of publications, including textbooks, reference books, etc.
• Certain disciplines have low numbers of journals and/or low journal usage
• Review articles are cited more often and change results
• Self-citing skews results​
• Working in a small field, publishing in a language other than English, or publishing mainly in books, generates fewer citations