Use research metrics to:

• provide evidence of your performance to support applications for grants and promotion
• quantify and determine how your research is being used
• identify other researchers or institutions that are using your research
• identify potential collaborators in your field.

The type of evidence you use to demonstrate your research impact will vary depending on your discipline. Each discipline has its own citing and publishing behaviour, and the value of metric analysis will vary across disciplines.

Use metrics responsibly

Adopt a holistic approach, incorporating multiple quantitative and qualitative metrics when evaluating your research performance.

Depending on the discipline, different measures may be more important than others, but none rely on just one tool or method. Metrics should be used critically and cannot replace the informed judgement of peers.

It is important to be aware of the limitations with metrics.

• Not all metrics will be relevant for describing your impact, it depends on your discipline and research outputs.
• Research impact measures are not comparable across disciplines.
• No one database will provide a comprehensive measurement of impact.
• Results between citation databases are not comparable since their coverage varies.
• Citation counts alone are not an indication of excellent research. They should be used with other qualitative measures.

Resources

• The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics outlines ten principles to guide research evaluation.
• The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment outlines a range of issues to keep in mind when using research metrics.
• Using SciVal responsibly: a guide to interpretation and good practice
• Using InCites Responsibly: a guide to interpretation and good practice

Library support for research metrics and impact

Learn how to generate and analyse your metrics for promotion or grant applications.

Book a consultation with your Librarian to learn how to gather and use metrics.

Contact your librarian to request tailored metrics training for a group of researchers within your faculty.

Request an impact report to support your grant application, journal selection or for a custom report.