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Research Assessment & Impact

This guide provides information about crafting impact statements and using metrics or other evidence to showcase research performance.

Considerations

  • The following metrics can only provide an indication of academic influence as they are only based on scholarly outputs and the citations from these outputs.
  • These metrics are subject to citation bias (over or under support of research outputs determined by gender, geographic location, favourable findings, self-citing practices, etc.).
  • An entity could be an institution, a research group or an individual researcher.

Publication metrics

  • counts the number of research outputs (e.g., journal articles, books, chapters, reports, exhibitions, designs, etc.) over a period of time
  • excludes theses and patents
  • are not comparable across different disciplines or entities of different sizes
  • suggested sources: ResearchOnline@JCU and Google Scholar.

Citation metrics

  • can be expressed as the number of times a work has been cited
  • can be expressed as the average number of citations for works by a researcher, group or institution
  • are not comparable across different disciplines or entities of different sizes
  • suggested source: Google Scholar.

Outputs in top citation percentiles

  • indicates the extent to which an entity's outputs are present in the most-cited thresholds of a data source per publication year (10% is recommended)
  • can be expressed as a percentage of outputs, which also offers normalisation for entities of different sizes
  • are not comparable across different disciplines
  • suggested sources: Scopus and SciVal.

Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)

  • is the ratio of the citations received by an entity's outputs and the average number of citations received by all other similar publications in a database.
    • a FWCI of 1.00 indicates that the entity's publications have been viewed exactly as would be expected based on the world average for similar publications in the same database.
    • a FWCI of 3.87 indicates that the entity's publications have been 287% more viewed than world average within the same database.
  • offers field normalisation for cross-disciplinary benchmarking
  • suggested sources: Scopus and SciVal.

H-index

  • measures productivity and academic influence by providing a single value as a ratio of the number of outputs and number of citations.
    • If a researcher has 10 publications with 10 or more citations, they will have a h-index of 10
    • If a researcher has 1 publication and the publication has 100 citations, the author's h-index will still be 1
    • If a researcher has 20 publications and each publication only has a single citation, the h-index will still be 1.
  • are typically not useful for researchers with a low number of published works
  • is not comparable across different disciplines
  • suggested sources: Scopus, SciVal and Google Scholar.

Metric sources at JCU

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