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Measuring Research Impact

The University of Western Sydney nurtures a distinctive, high-impact research culture, committed to enhancing our region's cultural, economic, environmental and educational development, and responsive to contemporary challenges in Greater Western Sydney and beyond. Comprehensive detail about research at UWS can be found on the UWS website

Measuring research impact is important for a number of reasons:
  • Grant/Funding applications
  • Staff Promotion/employment applications
Research impact of journal articles may be measured by:

Research Impact of books and book chapters is more difficult to measure but could include:

  • Citation tracking (for assistance tracking book citations in Scopus and Web of Science please contact the Research Services Librarian)
  • Libcitations, which considers the international library holdings of a given book  as a measure of its importance (White et al, 2009)
  • Review coverage of the book or chapter. These may be located by conducting searches in the subject databases, newspaper databases, Google and Google Scholar.

Reference
White, H., Boell, S.K., Yu, H., Davis., Wilson, C.S., and Cole, F.T.H., (2009) Libcitations: A measure for comparative assessment of book publications in the humanities and social sciences, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 60 (6), 1083-1096

For further information contact the Research Services Librarian