Research Impact

Research Impact is the demonstrable contribution that research makes in academia and society. The impact of your research can be determined a number of ways.

Why measure and track research impact? 

• Strengthen your case when you apply for promotion or tenure
• Quantify return on research investment for grant renewals and progress reports 
• Strength future funding requests by showing the value of completed work
• Identify who is using your work and confirm that it is appropriately credited 
• Identify collaborators within or outside of your subject area.

The Journal Impact Factor is typically determined by comparing two components: the number of citations a journal receives over the previous two years (A), and the number of articles that journal published over the same two years (B). A/B equals the Impact Factor of the journal. 

There is no one way to measure research impact. As methods of research, scholarship, and scholarly communication expand, new metrics are developed in an attempt to improve upon existing methods and to measure new ways of publication. Dissatisfaction with existing metrics has also inspired the creation of new methods. As different disciplines place more importance on a particular metric and disregard another, know that research measurement can be fallible, deserves investigation, and having more methods of measurement is a good thing. XKCD comic below.