
There are many tools and systems available to quantitatively assess the value of your research - collectively known as bibliometrics. You can analyse various statistics at journal, author and article level to help gauge the impact research has had.
Remember that all these systems do not look at the context in which work has been discussed, so even research which is being mentioned in a negative light can produce what appears to be a high-value bibliometric result.
When reviewing the importance of a specific journal title there are a number of useful tools available:
As with the journal based metrics, there are a variety of ways to gauge the impact of authors and articles:
Paper number | Author A # of Citations | Author B # of Citations | Author C # of Citations |
1 | 25 | 56 | 127 |
2 | 23 | 8 | 98 |
3 | 15 | 8 | 2 |
4 | 8 | 7 | 2 |
5 | 6 | 7 | - |
6 | 2 | 6 | - |
7 | 2 | 1 | - |
8 | 1 | 0 | - |
h-index | 5 | 6 | 2 |
h-Index values can be found through viewing citation reports in resources such as Web of Science and SCOPUS, or via the Metrics options in Google Scholar, or simply by finding the citations of all an author's publications and using the approach described above.
The main criticism of the h-index is that while an author's h-index cannot drop over time, it fails to recognise high-impact authors who have not published a large number of articles, as your h-index can never exceed the total number of papers you have published.
Creating an Author ID may help you to monitor your own impact, ORCID allows you to create a unique identified which can then be used in resources such as Web of Science, SCOPUS, and Linked-In. RKES can issue an ORCID for you, if you haven't already registered for one.
While the methods for tracking the impact of book content are not as well established, Web of Science is adding books to its data-set via the development of the Book Citation Index, and Google Scholar includes book chapter citation counts in its results.