5-Day Research Impact Challenge: Day 5: Track Your Impact
Day 5: Track Your Impact
Track Your Impact Using Citation Alert Tools and Alternative Metrics
Why: Tracking your research impact by monitoring citations and mentions, and using alerts and altmetrics to capture ongoing influence, can help you effectively demonstrate your research’s value across academic, economic, and societal domains.
Basic Challenges:
1) Google Scholar Alerts: Search Google Scholar to explore which publications have cited your research outputs and set up citation alerts to at least two of your papers.
- Search for the title of one of your published papers in Google Scholar.
- Click "Cited by" underneath the paper.
- Explore each resulting paper for the context of when, what and how your work was cited.
- Collate and record each mention in a personal spreadsheet for later use, e.g., in work or funding applications.
- Tip: Export selected records citing your paper/s from your Google Scholar Profile if you have been publishing for some time.
- Click "Create alert" from this Cited by screen to set up ongoing Google Scholar Alerts to your paper.
- Expect a Google Scholar email when your work is cited!
2) Scopus Altmetrics: Search Scopus to reveal alternative ways (altmetrics) to track research impact.
Watch: Finding PlumX Metrics in Scopus
Search for this title:
"A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990-2010: A systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010"
In the record view scroll down, click Metrics in the sidebar, then More Metrics.
- Usage => Clicks, Downloads, Views, Plays, Library Holdings…
- Capture => Bookmarks, Favourites, Readers, Watchers…
- Mentions => Blog posts, News mentions, Comments, Reviews…
- Social media => Likes, Shares, Comments, Tweets…
Advanced Challenges
Challenge: Use the Altmetric Bookmarklet
Why: It visualises mentions of a works with a DOI (or similar) in news articles, blogs, social media, policy documents, and more. Use the visualisations in your CV, funding applications…
Task: Install Altmetric.com’s bookmarklet in your browser toolbar.
Step 1: Click the Altmetric It! bookmarklet when you’re on the page of journal article or another item with a DOI (or PubMed ID, ArXiV ID, or Handle), so you can check its impact. 
Click the "coloured wheel" for more detail:
Challenge: Use Publish or Perish™ to track scholarly citations and calculate citation and impact metrics.
Why: It can retrieve and analyse citation data to work out your Author metrics, including h-index all in one user-friendly screen or downloadable file. You can also use it to analyse authors publishing in lead journals in your area of research,
Note: It's particularly useful if your work has limited representation in Web of Science or Scopus.
Task 1: Download Publish or Perish™ ( a free programme to analyse Google Scholar citation data and install it on your computer).
Publish or Perish on Microsoft Windows | Publish or Perish on macOS
Task 2: Learn the basics:
- Watch: Publish or Perish Demo – Author Searches [5:19],
- Follow the search steps in our short Maximise your impact with Publish or Perish guide so you can test drive it by author, or paper, and/or journal.
- Right click over a paper to view Citing Works, so you can gather actual mentions, OR Copy, OR Save results for later investigation.
