Research Impact

Maximizing the impacts of your research

In this competitive environment, it is important to demonstrate the research impact our faculty have or are engaged in. This page is intended to help individual researchers and research units at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Toronto, to promote their research and to use their impact evidence in successfully competing for research funding or getting promotion.

1. Establishing your researcher identity

2. Tracking your research impact

2.1 Tools for calculating bibliometric at the individual level

2.2. Tools for benchmarking researcher performance at the individual, departmental and institutional levels

3. Increasing your research impact


1. Establishing your researcher identity 

The accuracy of research output and impact analysis are dependent on a number of factors. For example, the accuracy of author indexing in the research analytic product, and linking individuals to their actual publications plays a crucial role in this process. This can be especially difficult for those authors who have common first and last names, or who have changed their names throughout their career. Creating an Author ID makes it much easier to distinguish between researchers with the same or similar names and ensures all citations created by one individual are accounted for.

1.1.   Scopus 

Scopus automatically assigns an Author ID to each author indexed in its databases. However, it is the researchers' responsibility to ensure that all of their outputs recorded in Scopus have been merged under a single Scopus Author ID. It is important to note that the Author Profile in Scopus contains articles indexed in this database only, and not all articles published by one author may be indexed in Scopus. The Scopus Author ID does not provide a full picture of the publishing history of the author, if the articles are indexed elsewhere.  

1.2.   Web of Science 

Researchers need to create a ResearcherID and then populate it by searching for their publications within Web of Science and adding them to the RearcherID. You can also add articles not indexed in Web of Science to your publication list within the ResearcherID profile.

1.3 ORCID

It is highly recommend that researchers create an ORCID Author Identifier (a 16-digit identifier). This identifier is required by many funding agencies: After registering for an ORCID ID researchers can populate their ORCID profile by searching and linking to publications, grants indexed in external databases. Researchers can push their professional information to other systems or give permission to trusted organizations to read from their profile. In this way, researchers do not need to repeatedly enter the same professional information into multiple systems. For instance, by linking ORCID and NCBI accounts, researchers can transfer information from their ORCID record to the SciENcv (Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae) system to create National Institute of Health (NIH) or NSF biosketches.

2. Tracking your research impact 

Once researchers have a unique ID, it is easy to use metrics to evaluate research impact. Please note that since no single database indexes every type of publication, and no single citation-tracking database has the same coverage, metrics cannot provide a comprehensive indication of a given researcher’s, or institutions' research output. It should be used to complement, not replace, other research assessment measures, such as peer-review. In order to use these metric measures appropriately, it is important to start by identifying the questions the results will help to answer and then collecting data accordingly. Some of the example questions and possible metrics can be used to answer them:

Possible metrics for Research Impact

About Benchmarking

Questions from individual/institutions

What is your research performance?

How can you demonstrate the influence of your research?

How do you compare to others in the same discipline at other institutions nationally and globally?

How many articles did you publish in this particular journal last year compared with your competitor?

Who are the top performers and why are they better than others?

How to identify your relative strengths and weaknesses?

Quantitative measure

Productivity:

  • Number of publications Impact/Influence:
  • Total number of citations for all publications
  • Number of citations for a particular item
  • Number of downloads
  • Number of highly cited papers
  • h-index

Weighted quantitative measure

Impact/Influence:

  • Normalized Citation impact (normalized for subject area, document type, and year).
  • Percentage of documents cited
  • Field baselines: average citations per paper for papers in a field defined for a specific time period
  • Expected citation rate: how often a paper is expected to be cited based on its year of publication, journal, and article type or subject category
  • Percentile: indicate how a paper has performed relative to others in its field.
  • Average citations per publication

About collaboration

Questions from individual/institutions

Who are you collaborating with?

How collaborative are you?

What are the output and citation impact of our co-authored publications?

How to assess output and impact of publications with certain collaboration partners relative to performance of the entire institution

How can you Identify potential collaborators?

Which Countries, Institutions and Authors are the most active?

Quantitative measure

  • Number of collaborating Institutions
  • Number of co-authored publications
  • Number of citations
  • Number of Citing Countries
  • National /International Collaboration (geographical)
  • Academic-Corporate Collaboration

Weighted quantitative measure

  • Field-Weighted Citation Impact
  • Average citations per publication/li>

About research trends

Questions from individual/institutions

What are the emerging and declining topics in your Research Area?

Quantitative measure

  • Citation reports by topic
 

About funding agency

Questions from individual/institutions

How to identify funding agencies who will support your research? How to identify the most prolific authors/institutions with a specific funding agency? (Potential collaborator?) How to analyze the impact of research funded by a specific funding agency? How to compare the research output/impact of research funded by different funding agency?

Quantitative measure

  • Web of Science Documents
  • Times Cited

Weighted quantitative measure

  • % Docs Cited
  • Category Normalized Citation Impact

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2.1 Tools for calculating bibliometrics at the individual level

The following are some common tools which are available to help researchers calculate bibliometrics for their scholarly work. You can also set up alerts in these tools so that when someone cites one of your articles you will receive an email.

Web of Science

  • Go to Author Search.
  • Enter your name, select the research domains
  • Then select the organizations,
  • Click on “Finish”.
  • Check the search results, once you make sure the publication list is accurate, click on "Create Citation Report."

Need help? Watch Author Search, Citation Report and Author Identifier from Web of Science

Scopus

  • Go to Author Search.
  • Enter the last name and initials. A list of author grouped by institution and subject areas is then displayed.
  • Use "Limit" or "Exclude" to refine your results by various categories.
  • Then, select the appropriate author groups
  • Click on "View citation Overview".

Need help?  Watch Author Search and how to manage your Scopus author profile from Scopus.

Google Scholar

  • Go to: Google Scholar Citations
  • Create a profile. You can choose to keep it private, or make your profile public.
  • Once you have created a profile page, you can view metrics such as number of citations for each article and h-index.

Need help? Read How to set up your Google Scholar profile from Impact story.

Altmetrics

Researchers are increasingly sharing their citations with their colleagues on social media platforms. A new method of measurement for type of sharing is required to capture its impact . Altmetrics, or alternative metrics, try to capture the impact of scholarly articles shared via social media channels. Examples of Altmetrics include:

The following tools can help you track article-level Altmetrics:

2.2 Tools for benchmarking research performance at the individual, departmental and institutional levels 

There are two major bibliometric tools for benchmarking researcher performance based on citations for publications indexed in databases. SciVal provides metrics for publications indexed in Scopus, and InCites for publications indexed in Web of Science.

For both of these tools, the entity can be:

  • a single research, publication or institution
  • a group of researchers, a set of publications, or a group of institutions

For detailed information about how to use SciVal, please watch: Video: Overview module and Video: Benchmarking module

For detailed information about how to use InCites, please watch: InCites training videos    

3. Increasing your research impact 

To increase research impact, research has to be visible and open. The following are some suggestions:

3.1 Create a publishing strategy, choose the right journal:

3.2 Showcase your research:

  • making your publications open access
  • submitting your publications to an institutional repository such as UofT's TSpace

N.B. We compared articles written by our faculty members in the same year and from the same journal and found that articles in TSpace received more citations.

3.3. Share your work via multiple channels

  • Feature “Altmetrics Score” on your public profile pages
  • Use library social media platform: blog, twitter, YouTube (library has already create a hashtag #DentFacultyPub for promoting faculty publications)
  • Personal Facebook, blog, twitter
  • Guest blog post on a popular blog
  • Write for professional association newsletters
  • Create 'video abstract' of your publication and put it on YouTube