Research Guides: Scholarly Impact Metrics: Maximize Impact

Additional Assistance

Interested in learning more about scholarly impact metrics? Please contact your library subject specialist to set up a consultation.

Strategies to Maximize Your Impact

There are key steps researchers can take to make sure your work is discoverable and is credited to you.

Create Unique Researcher Identifiers
Create Researcher Profiles
Share Your Research Online
Take Steps to Broaden Your Impact

Create a Unique Researcher Identifier

Creating a unique ID and being consistent in how your name is listed as an author can greatly help in ensuring that all your work is collected under your name and associated with you as an individual. Also, be consistent in how your list your institutional affiliation.

ORCID is a service that assigns a persistent identifier to a researcher. This unique, persistent identifier number distinguishes you from other researchers with the same or similar names.

Many major funders and journal publishers mandate or strongly recommend that researchers and authors include their ORCID with their application or submission.

ResearcherID is another service that assigns unique identifiers to individuals to help distinguish authors from each other. ResearcherID integrates with Web of Science and is ORCID compliant.

Create Researcher Profiles

ResearcherID
A service of Thomson Reuters. It assigns unique identifiers to individuals to help distinguish authors from each other. ResearcherID integrates with Web of Science and is ORCID compliant. A ResearcherID number is necessary to get the most accurate h-index number and citation count for an author.
Google Scholar Profile
A Google Scholar Profile tracks your publications listed in Google Scholar, provides the number of citations and links to the items citing your work, and calculates your h-index. (Note: You need to have a Gmail account to track your profile. Once you are logged in to your Gmail account, click on "My citations" to view and edit your profile.)
Impactstory
This web-based service collects metrics and displays them with a link that can be added to CVs. Join free with an ORCID account.

Share Your Research Online

The process of writing for publication often creates several outputs in addition to the final journal article, book, or book chapter. Consider posting slides from presentations, brief videos of presentations, data sets, or other materials online with a link to the official publication.

Postprints/White Papers/Drafts of work - DigitalCommons@EMU or subject/disciplinary repositories.
Presentation Slides - SlideShare or Speaker Deck
Videos - Vimeo or YouTube
Data Sets - Dryad or figshare (figshare can handle other outputs as well)
Code & Software - GitHub

Take Steps to Broaden Your Impact

Add postprints/white papers/drafts of work to your institutional repository, DigitalCommons@EMU, or to a disciplinary repository.
Craft a work's title and abstract carefully. Repeat keywords so the work is highly relevant in search engines.
Publish in open access journals or pay to have the work available open access in a subscription journal.
Link your most recent research to your email signature.
Discuss your research findings on a blog or through Twitter.
Contribute to Wikipedia, either in a new entry or in the text and references of an existing entry.