I have been asked this question on so many occasions. Truth is, I don’t have the “best” answer to this question. However, I am hoping you could help share some innovative ideas with respect to the above question.
Thanks.
Dear Kolade Victor Otokiti many thanks for your interesting technical question which is certainly of broad interest to many RG members. Since it is rather difficult to judge the quality of published articles, the impact of an individual researchers is normally reduced to certain numbers. Typically these numbers include the overall number of published papers and the number of times these papers have been cited by other researchers. In the end, an easily accessible measure for the impact of an individual researcher is the so-called h-index. For some more general information about this please have a look at the following useful link:
How to Measure Researcher Impact
https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/measuring-research-impact/your-impact
In order to get an idea how the h-index is calculated, please check the respective Wikipedia entry at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index
In general one can say that many people / researchers / officials love numbers like the h-index because they are easily understood and easily compared. Much more difficult to evaluate is the long-term impact of a researcher in real life, e.g. in the form of practical applications of published results. In my opinion, this is more important than numbers.
I think the citations of any article is a best way to measure the impact of a researcher's article. However I endorse the shared links by Dr. Frank T. Edelmann.
An author's impact on their field or discipline has traditionally been measured using the number of times they have published and the number of times their academic publications are cited by other researchers.
The process whereby the impact or "quality" of an article is assessed by counting the number of times other authors mention it in their work. Citation analysis invovles counting the number of times an article is cited by other works to measure the impact of a publicaton or author.
According to Journal Citation Reports (JCR), an impact factor is a ratio focusing on original research. For example, if a journal has an impact factor of 2.5, this means in the indexed year each article published was cited on average 2.5 times in the previous two years in that journal.
@Kamal M Alsaad @Aijaz Panhwar @Frank T. Edelmann
Thank you for your contributions.
Dear @Kolade Otokiti To my opinion, Citation count, downloads and reads are a few indicators of the impact of any published article.
Best wishes, AKC
I agree with Vishnu Kumar Gupta and others. Just a small correction: the self-citations should not be counted
Kindly paraphrase and cite the source if borrowing is necessary. The attachment shows a direct copy and paste from the following source.
University of Houston. (2021). Guides: Manage your research output: Home. Guides at University of Houston. https://guides.lib.uh.edu/c.php?g=883758&p=6350103
Hi Kolade
It depends if the researcher is looking to evaluate the overall impact of all their articles or the impact of an individual article. Other researchers have already mentioned metrics for an overall picture such as h-index or reads on ResearchGate, which can show an overall picture. A researcher could also sign onto GoogleScholar for a personal profile which will show an h-index (but includes self-cites), an i-10 index (also includes self-cites) of how many papers have been cited 10 or more times as well as total cites.
Many journals offer information on the impact of an individual article - usually called article metrics, which shows how often it has been viewed, downloaded, and cited. They also might offer a measure called Altmetric, which tends to show if it has been referred to in social media. A third strategy could be to search on Google Scholar to see if it has been used in course work readings, which might provide additional support of its value. Using all these strategies a researcher could get a sense of how much impact their work has had.
Mohialdeen Alotumi Thanks for you post. Plagiarism should not be tolerated in whatever form. Personally, if I detect plagiarism, I always report to the RG administration. Please, check the blue "share" next to "Recommend." Click it and you will see "Report"
Kamal M Alsaad I would advise you to delete your post
Yurii V Geletii, thanks for the tip. I have already done it and waiting for the RG to take it down.
Best,
Mohialdeen Alotumi Thanks, sometimes they ignore the report. We'll see.
I forgot to mention a tool that has been used in research papers to estimate faculty contributions to research is 'Publish or Perish', which tends to be more comprehensive. See https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish
In my opinion, this is not such an easy question to be answered since the idea 'impact' cannot exactly be understood without boundaries. Merriam Webster defines the noun 'impact' as 'forceful contact'. Okay, if we consider this as our starting point, this 'contact' can be appeared in many ways. For example, citations, views, downloads, recommendations, mentions, and clicks can all be considered as contacts (there can be more). However, we still do not have a proper universal way/consensus to meare their overall count. Therefore, the impact of an article one determines can often be differentiated from the impact that determined by another for the same article. This is not only differ from person to person, but also among the systems that measure them. For instance, these numerical counts reported by Google Scholar for a selected case usually differ from the counts reported by Scopus or another A&I database for the same case. We at least do not have consensus about which database/service we have to consider/believe. Furthermore, the number of citations received and altmetrics may depend on many other factors apart from the properties/qualities of the article we consider. One good example is the 'visibility'. The visibility of an article could directly influenced by where it was published and where its venue has been indexed/abstracted. As a result, some potentially influential articles may receive minimum attention while some others receive very high attention due to their higher visibility. Therefore, measuring and comparing of 'impact' of research is very complex in practical terms.
Ou have got nice response from many researchers, just to add a little,
impact of researcher's articles is commonly measured by the wide readership and citation. If article(s) is/are cited highly is means it has a good impact. Additionally, besides simple citation in research articles if the researcher's works have application in contributing to the society or technological development. It is of great impact.
On the RG, the citation, recommendations, and reading can reflect the impact of your work.
But, generally, the citation and the number of downloads can measure the impact.
I think the percent of citation is good indicator of research impact.
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