There are various tools available to help you keep track of where your research is being picked up and used. Using them, you might identify where your work is having an impact.

Bibliometrics

You can track and quantify the contribution that your research makes to academic advances, across and within disciplines, by referencing citations data.

There are many tools available for tracking citations, including Scopus & SciVal, Web of Science and Google Scholar. UCC Library provides guidance on measuring your publications’ impact and the various publications databases.

SciVal is a particularly useful tool for monitoring your academic impact by helping you to visualise research impact, benchmark impact relative to peers, find research partners, create customisable reports, and identify and analyse emerging research trends. Some guidance on using SciVal is available through the SciVal website including the Quick Reference Guide and Research Metrics Guidebook.

For help in understanding the different bibliometrics, see our bibliometric summary.

Beware of predatory publishing and make sure you can trust the journal that you are publishing as being the right outlet for your publication. Predatory publishers aim to make money by charging authors to publish articles, chapters or books without the proper checks and processes expected from academic services. They may claim that they do editing and peer review when in fact they do not. More information about predatory publishing is available on the Library website, including the Think, Check and Submit checklist.

Using metrics responsibly

Over recent years, the use and alleged abuse of metrics in research assessment has been in sharp focus, with four major frameworks all calling for a significant change in the culture of metrics use:

• The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)
• The Leiden Manifesto
• The Metric Tide
• Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA)

UCC is a recent signatory of the CoARA agreement. The agreement is based on 10 commitments to establish a shared direction for research assessment reform, with the aim of maximising the quality and impact of research. More information about CoARA is available here.

Societal and economic impact

Tracking societal and economic impact is a little more challenging than tracking academic impact. However, some tools are available to help you work out where your research is being used outside of academia:

• Tracking the attention your research outputs generate beyond readership of academic journals using Altmetrics or PlumX metrics.
• Tracking downloads of your research outputs stored in institutional repositories.
• Using website analytics to analyse the attention that your research website receives
• Using Impact Tracking Templates to plan and track progress against your impact goals

It is important to remember that these techniques do not give you insights into impact itself. Rather, they alert you to where your research is being picked up, which may help you to identify knock-on impacts.

Altmetrics

Altmetrics, or alternative metrics, look beyond traditional bibliometrics to track research impact through online interactions. This includes mentions of research on various social media platforms, contributions to policy, news mentions and downloads. Altmetrics platforms are also able to show you the international reach of your research.

Altmetrics tracks online engagement, allowing you to view the widespread attention and potential impact your research is receiving. Altmetrics has a free bookmarklet tool available for researchers which shows the metrics for individual research papers with a DOI, including:

• Where your paper is referenced by policy and patent documents
• Where your paper is being picked up by national and international news outlets
• Who is talking about your paper online

How to access the Altmetrics bookmarklet:

• Log on to the Altmetrics bookmarklet webpage.
• Complete contact form à submit à add bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar on your browser.
• Search for paper online (Altmetrics only works on research outputs with a persistent identifier e.g. DOI, PubMed ID).
• Click the Almetric it! tab on your bookmarks bar.
• Altmetric score will automatically appearing on the right side of your screen.
• Choose Click for more details to see a breakdown of the Altmetrics score for the publication.

Further guidelines on how to use the tool are available here.

PlumX

PlumX is another free altmetrics tool, available on Scopus. This tool shows the alternative metrics on all articles. PlumX connects to Overton (another altmetrics tool that looks specifically at policy) to show national and international policy contributions where relevant.

How to access PlumX:

• Log on to Scopus through the Library.
• Search for publication.
• Click on Metrics in the left-hand side column.
• Open dropdown menu by clicking arrow.
• Breakdown of PlumX metrics will appear.
• Click on View PlumX details to view more detail.

Downloads

You can also track online attention through download and viewing statistics from repositories and social networking sites, such as CORA (UCC’s Open Access Repository), ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and LinkedIn.

Website analytics

If you have a dedicated site for your research project, web analytics can give useful insights on the audience for your work. For example, you can track and report your website traffic using Google Analytics – a free web analytics tool that helps you understand how visitors are engaging with your website. Get the basic tracking code at the Google Analytics website.

Impact Tracking Template

Professor Mark Reed from Newcastle University has designed a useful Impact Tracking Template. This tool helps you track how different activities contribute to meeting your impact goals.

Here is how it works:

• Enter your impact goals and activities from your Impact Planning Canvas.
• Identify indicators that will easily tell you if your activities are working or not, and make sure you have got quick and easy ways of measuring your indicators.
• Assess your progress using the traffic light system and make any comments about the reasons for your assessment and what you plan to do.
• Do the same with indicators that will tell you if you are making progress towards your impact goals.