Monitoring research impact
After you’ve published your Open Access paper and made the supporting data available, how do you find out whether it’s being used?
Word of mouth - being approached by your fellow academics - is one way to gauge impact, but this won’t always be possible for every publication. Instead, you can use online tools to measure how often your work is cited, downloaded, shared, or talked about in social media and the news. These types of information are known as research metrics. Research metrics based on citation counts are known as bibliometrics or citation metrics, and research metrics based on social media likes, shares and mentions, news mentions, code forks and so on are known as ‘alternative metrics’. Both can be used to give an indication of the academic impact of your research.
Note that these metrics are a proxy for academic impact (demonstrable contribution to academic advances), but don't give an indication of wider impact (for example, effects on economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment, quality of life, and so on). See https://www.ukri.org/councils/esrc/impact-toolkit-for-economic-and-social-sciences/defining-impact/ for additional examples of different types of research impact, and contact the RED Research Policy team for advice on demonstrating the wider impact of your research.
Responsible metrics
Metrics alone can’t give a full picture of academic impact - they look at quantity of citations and mentions, not quality, and as noted above may not reflect valuable industry or other non-academic impact which doesn’t result in citations.
In addition, different disciplines accrue citations at very different rates, so simple citation counts must not be used to compare researchers in different disciplines, research areas, or career stages. Be aware also of the source for citation data - most tools use only a single source of citation data, so if your paper is being heavily cited in journals that aren’t indexed by that particular source, you won’t see a true reflection of academic impact.
If you aren’t sure which metrics to use, how to interpret them, or you’re not seeing the level of academic impact you would expect, please contact the Library’s research metrics support service for advice: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/staff/researchers/metrics/help/.
Online tools
The University of Bristol subscribes to SciVal for access to citation data. This resource offers citation data based on information from Scopus. Through SciVal, you can access citation counts as well as a variety of other metrics.
There are a number of other tools available offering access to citation data from different sources; see http://www.bristol.ac.uk/staff/researchers/metrics/tools/ for more examples.