Upcoming Special Event: Research Webinars
The library is hosting two webinars on research writing and publishing, featuring guest speaker Ximena Alvira MD, PhD. Exclusive to Monash Health.
Find information and guidance on using tools for conducting research, including creating a researcher profile, measuring research impact, and marketing and social media. If you have suggestions for additional guides or require research assistance, contact us at library@monashhealth.org.
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Provides evidence-based information about research metrics across disciplines, including how each metric is calculated, where to find it, and how to apply it. |
Free altmetric information for over 100 million publications including grants, patents, clinical trials, and policy documents. |
Free online tutorial with three modules: Introduction to bibliometrics, Tracking your research impact, Journal ranking and analysis. |
Research metrics are quantitative tools that aim to measure the impact of research outputs or individual researchers. Metrics based on the output of a researcher are known as author-level metrics. Three common author-level metrics are summarised below.
Highly Cited Researchers 2021 by Clarivate Analytics provides a list of researchers who in the last 10 years have authored or co-authored the highest number of highly-cited research papers.
h-index
The h-index (or Hirsch index) is an author-level metric that indicates how productive and influential an individual researcher is. It is based on the number and impact of a researcher’s publications. An h-index of 20 means that, out of all papers published by an author, 20 of them have been cited at least 20 times. It is best used to compare researchers working within the same field, due to differing citation conventions across research fields.
Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar include the citation data for h-index in their databases. However, the h-index of an author will be different in each of these databases, since the number is calculated using their own database content.
g-index
The g-index was designed as an improvement on the h-index, although it can be used to complement rather than simply replace the h-index. The key difference between the two is that the g-index puts more weight on a researcher's highly-cited papers. It is not as widely used as the h-index.
i10-index
The i10-index was created by Google Scholar and is used only within Google Scholar. Another author-level metric, it is the number of publications with at least 10 citations.
Altmetrics (alternative metrics) consider a wide range of activity such as tweets, facebook posts, article views and downloads and discussion on scholarly networking sites and repositories. Many databases, Open Access archives (such as ArXiv) and repositories now contain this type of article level metrics.
A beginner's guide to altmetrics, Altmetric you tube channel, May 2016.
An Altmetric Bookmarklet (once installed) is available to capture this data in Google Scholar. Here is an example:
We recommend the following online tools for altmetrics.
See our Open Access guide for more OA resources and information.
Visualisation tools can assist in discovering and demonstrating connections or relationships between entities and may add clarity and impact to an analysis. The following online tools are freely available.
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