Research Guides: Research Impact and Evaluation: Home

About this guide

Assessing quality and importance of work is an ongoing and increasing concern for funders and promotion and tenure committees. "Research impact” is defined as “real change in the real world," including changes in attitudes; awareness; economic or social status; policy, cultural or health outcomes. Broader research impact requires a purposeful approach to making sure that more people can find, understand and act upon your research. (Charlie Rapple, How Related are Journal Impact and Research Impact?)

Impact Factor is one measure of the relative importance of a journal to literature and research. Informed and careful use of the impact data is essential and the following must be kept in mind:

The number of times a paper is cited is not a measure of its actual quality.
Some tools that measure the impact data do not incorporate books.
Certain disciplines have low numbers of journals and usage. One should compare journals or researchers within the same discipline.
Review articles are cited more often and can change results.
Self-citing may skew results.

Research Impact
Useful pages from WU Becker Medical Library
Quantifying the Impact of My Publications
More helpful pages from Becker Medical Library
Becker Medical Library's Assessing the Impact of Research
A framework for tracking diffusion of research outputs and activities to locate indicators that demonstrate evidence of biomedical research impact

Metrics Toolkit
Summaries, use case examples and much more
Scholcommlab Metrics Literacies
an integrated set of competencies, dispositions and knowledge that empowers individuals to recognize, interpret, critically assess and effectively and ethically use scholarly metrics
Oxford Academic Collection: Publishing advice and guidance
This reading list is a useful guide for early career researchers and academics wanting to know more about journal publishing.
APA Style Jars
APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards (APA Style Jars) are a set of standards designed for journal authors, reviewers, and editors to enhance scientific rigor in peer-reviewed journal articles. Educators and students can use APA Style JARS as teaching and learning tools for conducting high quality research and determining what information to report in scholarly papers.
Publication Integrity Week 2023
Publication Integrity Week included a variety of sessions to discuss handling misconduct, paper mills, post-publication corrections, and other ethical concerns.
The Future of Research Evaluation: A Synthesis of Current Debates and Developments
This 2023 paper discusses how new evaluation models are being implemented, but expected goals are not being met, raising concerns about potential fragmentation in the research landscape. The paper emphasizes the importance of collective action and mutual learning among “diverse stakeholders” to drive systemic change and promote inclusivity in research evaluation. Ultimately, it seeks to encourage ongoing conversations about the future of research evaluation.
A proposal for the future of scientific publishing in the life sciences
The authors of this 2019 article advocate for a “publish first, curate second” approach.
Scholia
Scholia is a service that creates visual scholarly profiles for topics, people, organizations, species, chemicals, etc using bibliographic and other information in Wikidata.
Institutional Journals Index
The research published in journals indexed in IJI represent local interest and Indigenous research and reports significant findings. IJI captures invisible research and makes it available on its platform. They do not measure or judge the quality of papers for inclusion but use a few minimum quality thresholds before entering them into IJI. IJI is an article-level index of research journals published by institutions such as colleges, universities and laboratories.
Databases covering research outputs from the global south