Research Impact: Home
Research Impact and Engagement
Our goal is to help you communicate the impact of your work in a variety of ways to tell your research story to peers, funders, policy makers, and the public. We can help in the following ways:
- Responsible Research Evaluation: Shape evaluation based on defined values, appropriate contexts and audiences, and qualitative and quantitative measures.
- Benchmarking: Faculty/departments can request reports to benchmark their research output with comparable universities worldwide.
- Grant Application Support: Compiling metrics may improve grant applications for individual or team grants.
- Data Gathering & Interpretation: Bibliometric data may be collected for specific disciplinary groups or institutional levels.
- Consultation & Guidance: Appointments are available to learn more on research impact and its measures.
- Training: Customized training/workshops on how to collect and analyze bibliometric data (eg. Scopus, SciVal, etc.) and curate your Experts Directory profile.
What is Research Impact?
“Impact” is a broad term that encompasses the reach and influence of a researcher’s work. There are several ways to communicate the value of your research. Measuring and conveying your research impact are crucial for improving research grant applications, supporting tenure application and promotions, and connecting with other researchers and project collaborators.
Some examples include:
- Who is citing your work?
- Has your work influenced other kinds of tangible outcomes? (e.g. development of new instruments, methods, practice, or policy based on your research)
- Have news sources picked up your research and shared it with the masses?
- How has your research provided opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and fostering of future scholars?
Research Impact Tools
Many metrics and tools are available to help you analyze and share your research impact.
- Metrics ToolkitLearn more about specific research impact metrics and what they measure.
- SciValQuick and easy access to the research performance of 8500 research institutions and 220 countries worldwide. SciVal requires a one-time registration from on campus.
Visualization Tools
- DatawrapperCreate interactive & responsive charts, maps, and graphs through this free web-based tool.
- VOSviewerIdeal for analyzing bibliometric networks such as creating maps of publications, authors, or journals based on co-citation networks or keyword co-occurrence networks.
- Tableau PublicInteractive visualizations for developing your data story through graphs, charts, and maps.
Attribution
Content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and is adapted from "Research Impact" by University of Alberta Library Research Impact Services which is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and their Introduction to Research Impact Tutorial
