Demonstrate Your Impact: Journal Rankings & Citation Metrics

Journal rankings and citation metrics are quantitative measures that can demonstrate the impact of your work. These measures can vary based on the tool used to calculate them. The most well-known measure is a journal Impact Factor, but other, more granular measures such as Article Influence Scores, can also provide qualitative evidence of your work's impact.

Many academic cultures and promotion review processes rely on measuring and demonstrating the impact of one’s scholarly work. One of the most straightforward and arguably most accepted ways to do so has been to provide quantitative measures of one’s work such as citation counts, quantity of publications, and potentially mapping impact to the Impact Factor of the journal in which research is published. Quantitative measures have their limits. According to Rafael Ball (2018) in An Introduction to Bibliometrics, quantitative measures should be considered alongside resonance analysis and perception analysis:

Resonance analysis is the next step in the bibliometric method and follows on from the pure ascertainment of the output quantity. It goes beyond purely counting publications. Not only is the number of publications by a person, organisation or region simply determined here, but also scientific community's perception of them...The use and acceptance of perception analysis and its assertion that the number of citations constitutes a meaningful gauge for the quality of an academic project, however, assumes (like all bibliometric methods based on it) that there is a reliable correlation between the number of citations of a work and its quality… Nonetheless, a vast number of scientists accept these assumptions at least to a certain extent, even if it is unclear what mathematical relation the number of citations bears to the quality of the work. (p. 22)

Image: Yearly citation graph generated from Web of Science's Analyze Results function.