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Assessing the Impact of Research: Further Reading

This guide will help you understand how to assess the impact of scholarly research, including explanations of terminology and assessment tools.

References

Caveats and Cautions

  • Abbott, A., et al. (2010).  Do metrics matter? Nature, 465(7300), 860-862. 

  • Adler, R., Ewing, J., & Taylor, P. (2008).  Citation statistics: a report from the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in coopeeration with the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). Berlin: International Mathematical Union.   http://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Report/CitationStatistics.pdf

  • Arnold, D.N. (2008). Integrity under attack: the state of scholarly publishing.  [Talk of the Society editorial] SIAM News 42(10).

  • Ball, P. (2008). A longer paper gathers more citations. Nature, 455(7211), 274-275. 

  • Browman, H.I., & Stergiou, K.I. (Eds.) (2008).  Use and misuse of bibliometrics indices in evaluating scholarly performance [Special Issue]. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, 8(1).  http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/esep/v8/n1/ 

  • Laloe, F., & Mosseri, R. (2009).  Bibliometric evaluation of individual researchers: not even right ... not even wrong.  Europhysics News, 40(5), 26-29.  http://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2009/05/epn20095p26.pdf 

  • Opatrny, T. (2008).  Playing the system to give low impact journal more clout.  Nature, 455(7210), 167. 

  • Pudovkin, A.I., & Garfield, E. (2004).  Rank-normalized impact factor: a way to compare journal performance across subject categories.  Proceedings of the 67th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 41, 507-515.

  • Waltman, L., & van Eck, N.J. (2011). The inconsistency of the h-index. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(2), 406-415.
 

Comparisons

  • Gray, E., & Hodkinson, S.Z. (2008, Summer).  Comparison of Journal Citation Reports and Scopus imact factors and environmental siences journals.   Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, Issue 54, Article 1.   http://www.istl.org/08-summer/article1.html 

  • Kulkami, A.V., et al. (2009).  Comparison of citation in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for articles published in general medical journals. JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, 302(10), 1092.  

  • Meho, L.I., & Yang, K. (2007).  Impact of data sources on citation counts and rankings of LIS facutly: Web of Science versus Scopus and Google Scholar.  Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 2105-2125. 

  • Podlubny, I., & Kassayova, I. (2006).  Towards a better list of citation superstars: compiling a multidisciplinary list of highly cited researchers.  Research Evaluation, 15(3), 154-169.

  • Van Noorden, R. (2010).  Metrics: a profusion of measures.  Nature, 465(7300), 864-866. 

  • Van Aalst, J. (2010).  Using Google Scholar to estimate the impact of journal articles in education.  Educational Researcher, 39(5), 387-400. https://www.aera.net/uploadedFiles/Publications/Journals/Educational_Researcher/3905/387-400_07EDR10.pdf 

 

History and Background

  • Garfield, E. (1997).  Concept of citation indexing: a unique and innovative tool for navigating the research literature.  Retrieved July 22, 2008, from http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/vladivostok.html. 

  • Garfield, E. (2006).  The history and meaning of the journal impact factor.  JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, 295(1), 90-93.
  • Garfield, E. (2007).  The evolution of the Science Citation Index.  International Microbiology, 10(1), 65-69.

  • Moed, J.F. (2005).  Citation analysis in research evaluation. Dordrecht: Springer.