This section includes some good practices and strategies as you being to collect and track your metrics, to use now or later.
Identify Your Priorities
Before you start looking for metrics or other information to support writing about your impact, it is important to identify your priorities, so that you know what you need to collect:
Choosing the Appropriate Metrics (and Tools)
It is important to select the appropriate metrics for the case you want to make, which in turn will help you select the appropriate tools for locating those metrics. For example, if you want to write about how your work has expanded knowledge within your field, then your journal articles getting cited in journals and other scholarly publications is something you will want to track. However, citations in the journal literature will not be as useful when writing about your outreach and public engagement. For this, news coverage, social media mentions, video views, and interviews could serve as better indicators.
The Metrics Toolkit is an excellent starting place to help you match impact, research output, and discipline to identify metrics and tools, as well as limitations and both appropriate and inappropriate use cases.
Impact | Research Object | Discipline | |
---|---|---|---|
Attention, Reach or Diffusion |
Authors Book Chapters Books Country Datasets |
Discipline Institution Journal Articles Journals Software/Code/Scripts |
Arts & Humanities Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics Social Sciences |
Another helpful resource is the Becker Medical Library Model for Assessment of Research Impact, which is organized by the following diffusion pathways: Advancement of Knowledge, Clinical Implementation, Community Benefit, Legislation and Policy, and Economic Benefit. From there it's organized by indicators and potential evidence. Some of the examples are obviously centered on outputs and impacts related to biomedical sciences, while others apply to all disciplines.
Where Do I Start With Gathering Metrics?
Set up your Google Scholar and (if you choose) ResearcherID profiles to collect citation metrics from Google Scholar and Web of Science, respectively. You also build your scholarly identity (along with ORCID) by creating a publications list of all your works, and only your works. You have the option of setting any or all of these profiles public or private. For the most discoverability of your work, consider making at least the Google Scholar profile public.
Before you actually have to write about your impact there are steps you can take to begin gathering this data, or at least make sure the data is being collected. Most of these activities can be run periodically or occasionally, or set up to run automatically.
Periodically
Also:
And: