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Research Impact Factors

Research Impact Factors

An Impact Factor is one measure of the relative importance of a journal, individual publication, or researcher to literature and research.

Journal impact factors, citations to publications, h-index of researchers are used to measure the importance and impact of research.

Informed and careful use of the impact data is essential and the following must be kept in mind:

  • The number of times a paper is cited is not a measure of its actual quality.
  • Some tools that measure the impact data do not incorporate books.
  • Certain disciplines have low numbers of journals and usage. One should compare journals or researchers within the same discipline.
  • Review articles are cited more often and can change results.
  • Self-citing may skew results.

Tutorial - Measuring your research impact (MyRI)

What is Citation Analysis

Citation analysis is a way of measuring the relative importance or impact of an author, an article or a publication by counting the number of times that author, article, or publication has been cited by other works.

Why is Citation Analysis important?

Researchers often ask:

What are the best journals in my field?
How do I check who is citing my articles?
How many times have I been cited?"
How do I know this article is important?"
How can I compare the research impact between journals so I know which journal should I publish in?

Citation analysis will provide the answers to the above questions.

Subjects: Researchers
Tags: research