Measuring Research Impact

This guide provides an introduction to measure the impact of publications and authors for promotion and tenure and other purposes.

Measuring Article Impact

Citation Counts

Traditionally, measuring the impact of an article has been done by tracking the number of times that article has been cited in another work.

Many databases will provide information about how many times an article has been cited. Citation numbers will vary from resource to resource, as they are only counting citations that are also indexed in that database.

Below are a few popular option for looking up citation counts.

Web of Science
Select "Cited Reference Search" and then enter the title of the article.

Google Scholar
Citation numbers will appear underneath the article in your Google Scholar search results.
PubMed Central
Click on "Cited in PMC" under "Related Information."

Download Counts

Article Download Counts

An emerging way to demonstrate the impact of an article is the number of times it has been downloaded online. Though not as impactful as citations, download counts can still provide useful context for how often an article is being read.

Suggestions for places to find download counts for your article include:

Journal publisher web pages
Academic social media sites such as ResearchGate
Pre-print repositories or institutional repositories

Download counts may also be available for other types of research output that are less likely to have citations, such as datasets or conference proceedings, and may be particularly useful for early-career researchers who have not yet had time for their citations to accumulate.