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Metrics: Understanding your Impact

This guide will assist researchers to articulate the impact of their works through the use of appropriate metrics. The positive and negative aspects of many common journal and article-level metrics are explored.

What's in a name?

Tracking individual impact can be complicated by name changes, common names, or names listed differently across publications (Ex: Jane Smith, Smith, Jane, J. Smith, J. A. Smith, etc.)

ORCID Identifiers are a solution to this problem that insures you capture the entire impact of your work. Registering for one of these unique identifiers is free, simple, and doing so also facilitates cross-system communication, ensuring that you are able to track the impact of your work broadly and across multiple systems.

ImpactStory

ImpactStory tracks the impact of not only your scholarly work, but also of any presentations, datasets, or other forms of scholarship you have made available online. By calculating metrics from altmetric (including Twitter and Facebook), Mendeley, Scopus, Figshare, Slideshare, and more, ImpactStory can give you a very good sense of how the works you create both within and outside of traditional publishing channels are influencing the scholarly conversation.