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Publication and Impact Analysis

A guide to bibliometrics, journal impact factors, h-index, altmetrics, etc.

Altmetrics

Having your work formally cited by other researchers is a very slow process. Altmetrics (number of tweets, blog posts, likes, bookmarks, policy mentions, etc. in social media) are faster and wider-ranging measures of how peopleboth other researchers and the general publicare interested in your work. 

ImpactStory & Other Altmetrics Tools

ImpactStory is a subscription tool that brings together a diverse assortment of altmetrics and traditional citation metrics for your research outputs, including both journal articles and datasets. Run a report on a particular journal article or dataset using its DOI or PubMed ID, or import your entire bibliography of articles/datasets using your ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) or a BibTeX file exported from Google Scholar

Other similar altmetrics tools include Altmetric Explorer (Emory does not have subscription) and PlumX (featured in our EBSCO databases, such as Political Science Complete, Econlit, PsycINFO and others). 

PlumX Example

Example of use of PlumX in our EBSCO databases.  Note in particular the social media data (shares, likes, tweets).

Other altmetric tools

In Faculty of 1000 Prime (Emory subscription), expert scientists and clinical researchers hand-pick interesting articles, rate them, and comment on their importance. 

Some Open Access Journals, such as PLoS ONE, allow reader comments and provide a variety of article-level metrics including number of views, downloads, and social media mentions. 

Some Pre-Print Repositories, such as the Social Sciences Research Network, provide number of views and downloads for each document. 

OpenEmory, an open repository of journal articles authored by Emory researchers, provides number of views and downloads for each article. 

Resources on AltMetrics

Sage Policy Profiles

Overton is a new tool that attempts to parse out mentions of academic work in various policy documents and research (think tanks, government publications, NGOs, IGOs, etc). Sage, the well-known publisher, has partnered with Overton to provide information on how well cited individual author research is cited in a wide range of policy documents, via a free service called "Sage Policy Profiles." The Sage service is free, and just requires a registration. It is highly recommended that researchers use their ORCID ID so as to better disambiguate authorship. Note that the Sage Policy Profiles doesn’t provide advanced policy discovery tools, and shows only a limited amount of policy to policy citations. This means that the tool is not suitable for studying policy influence or trends in a more general way, or for finding and analysing grey literature for research purposes.