LibGuides: Scholarly Impact: Overview

What is Scholarly Impact

Scholarly impact involves the academic, societal, and economical influence research has on the larger world. Impact of scholarship can be measured at the level of a journal, an author, or an article/manuscript.

About this Guide

Use the following links to learn about each area of scholarly impact.

Journal Impact
Learn more about journal impact and it's importance for your own scholarship.
Author Impact
Learn more about what author impact is and how to use it for learning more about scholarly impact.
Manuscript Impact
Learn about manuscript impact and what that means for your own scholarship.

*This guide has reused material, with permission, from Hirsh Health Sciences Library at Tufts University Measuring Research Impact guide: https://researchguides.library.tufts.edu/researchimpact, maintained by Judy Rabinowitz.

Criticism of Metrics

At Lavery Library we are committed to furthering the research reach and impact of our faculty, staff, and students. With this in mind, the below information provides additional information about the use of scholarly impact metrics.

Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)
A major theme of these recommendations is that metrics that evaluate journals should not be used to evaluate the research or researchers published within those journals.
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Recommendations compiled by a group of editors and publishers at the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in San Francisco on December 16, 2012.
The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics
Ten guiding principles for appropriate use of research metrics. Themes include qualitative assessment, mission focus, local relevance, transparency, and variation between fields.
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Formulated at the 2014 Conference on Science and Technology Indicators in Leiden. Full citation:
Hicks, D., Wouters, P., Waltman, L. et al. Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics. Nature 520, 429–431 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/520429a
Reliability of researcher metric the h-index is in decline
"Changing authorship patterns mean that the h-index is no longer an effective way to gauge a scientist’s impact, according to a new study by data scientists at technology giant Intel."