Measuring Academic Output

There are a number of metrics (bibliometrics) you need to use as a researcher, such as publication counts, citation counts, h-index and journal impact factors. Use metrics to choose high quality authors and publications for your research and to identify high impact researchers for collaboration.



You can do several things to find out when and by whom your publication is cited:

• Create a profile in Google Scholar Citations and get citation alerts
• Sign up on social networking sites, list your publications there and track how often they have been viewed and who is following you.
• Use alternative metrics (Altmetrics) to track the impact of your research. Downloads, tweets, likes or mentions are indicators on how often you publication has been discussed. Create an account with ImpactStory or install the altmetrics.com bookmarklet

Improve Your Impact

• The number of publications in any field increases enormously every year. It becomes more and more difficult for a researcher to keep track of recent publications even in relatively well defined disciplines. That means that it becomes more important to make a publication more visible so it won’t be overlooked.
• A few easy to do and easily applied steps can raise the visibility of your publication:
• Always use the same name version consistently throughout your career, e.g. “John J. O’Sullivan”, NOT “J. J. O’Sullivan”, “John O’Sullivan”, “John James O’Sullivan”
•  Use a standardised institutional affiliation and address
•  Publish in journals with high impact factor
•  Collaborate with researchers in other institutions
•  Deposit your publication (final draft or published paper - depending on copyright policy of publisher) in the Research Repository UCD. This has the added advantage of being able to automatically populate your School’s publications listing via RSS
•  Take advantage of SEO (search engine optimisation) by carefully selecting title and keywords for your publication
•  Register for an ORCID and/or Researcher ID in order to be more easily found in databases
•  Present preliminary research findings at meetings and conferences
•  Join academic social networking sites, e.g. Academia.edu, ResearchGate, LinkedIn
•  Use social bookmarking with Mendeley, Zotero or CiteULike
•  Start a blog devoted to your research project
•  Consider communicating information about your research via Twitter