Dear Ismaila Yusuf,

Of course, the first and most important metric is impact factor itself. Metrics include the analysis of journal articles and their citations using various bibliometric methods,  analysis of a diverse range of research outputs.  Please read the following articles:

http://www.britac.ac.uk/policy/peer-review/chap-6.cfm

http://www.int-res.com/articles/esep2008/8/e008p103.pdf

http://www.journalmetrics.com/documents/Journal_Metrics_Whitepaper.pdf

http://www.lms.ac.uk/sites/lms.ac.uk/files/HEFCEresponseMetrics.pdf

I agree with Sudev Naduvath and Rivalino Matias Jr. that impact factor is neasure for research quality; however, RG Score may be another measure of research quality.

Regards.

Certainly, Impact factor.

However, it depends on several factors: whether your academic board considers impact factor for journals for promotion purposes or not.

As a general rule, the quality research should depend on the contents of the paper and not the journal to which it is published. This is probably one of the strongest case for open access publishing. Academic boards that understand the monopoly around 3 and 4 star journals do not solely rely on the impact factor. 

The h-index is the real deal now.

I use the h-index of an author to know his/her influence in his field. 

I agree with the statement made by Peterson Ozili:

'As a general rule, the quality research should depend on the contents of the paper and not the journal to which it is published'

However, citations may be important metric to judge the quality of contents of paper.

hi

contribution to the field, filling the gaps in the literature, providing inspiration, profundity of the research questions , novelty and creativity of the topics

solving some educational issues,  robust data collection and interpretation procedures, proper sampling procedures,

Dear Ismaila, I am in agreement with the comment of Sadev, Peterson, Sanjay and Rahimi. They made a good comments on what should be consider while accessing research quality.

Any paper on reverse listing?

I think the research quality of a researcher should be estimated by several metrics. When you compare researchers and their impact you should collect multiple indicators to draw a conclusion. For example:

h-index, Impact Factor, RG-Score, citation counts and others

If a researcher has a high RG-Score but every other metric is low, I don't think that it is good evidence of a researcher's scientific quality. But if all of his metrics show proper statistics, it is a good sign for an efficient researcher

To me IF is still the best available metrics for evaluating research reliability, but it is definitely not perfect.

Also, please take a look at the San Francisco Declaration on Research

Assessment which is against IF (attached).