Research Impact Assessment (Health Sciences)

There are a number of different indicators that researchers might use to quantify the impact of their publications, including, but not limited to:

• Number of citations: A count of the number of times an article, or set of articles, has been cited by other researchers.
• H-index: A measure that attempts to describe an author’s productivity and impact.
• Journal indicators: Measures that journals use to illustrate the ratio of citations received per article published. Many see this as indicative of a journal's prestige.
• Article Indicators: Indicators that provide insight into the citation impact of a particular article. Some article indicators are field-normalized which allow the indicator to be compared across disciplines.

Learn more about each of these by visiting the different pages in the navigation menu on the left. Watch the video below for a short introduction to bibliometrics, including a description of citation count and the h-index.

Quantitative publication metrics offer a relatively quick and seemingly concrete measure of research impact and are used widely in the assessment of academic health sciences research. However, metrics can lead to over-simplification and sometimes serve as direct proxies for impact at the expense of other valuable considerations.

Several efforts have led to frameworks that promote the application of assessment metrics as one important aspect of a broader assessment process.