Scholarly Publishing

There are many metrics that can be used to measure the impact of your research. These include:

• Journal Impact Factor: An average of how many citations a specific journal has. A journal with a high impact factor has articles that are cited often.
• h-index: h-index focuses on the impact of only one scholar rather than the whole journal. This is calculated by organizing your articles from greatest to least number of times they've been cited, then finding the article that has a number of citations lower than its place in the ordered list. The number of articles above that point is one's h-index.
• i10-index: The number of publications you have with at least 10 citations (only used by Google Scholar).
• g-index: A slightly more complicated version of the h-index that gives more weight to the heavily cited articles.
• Eigenfactor score: A score calculated by eigenfactor.org that signals that the journal does not self-cite.
• Altmetrics (alternative metrics): These are a wide assortment of metrics calculated by companies such as altmetric.com that measure the attention an article receives.

Journal Impact Factor (or just Impact Factor or IF) is a measure of how frequently the average article in a journal has been cited in a given year or time period. It is used to measure the importance of a particular journal. Impact Factor is often found from a number of subscription resources that calculate this value for journals, but you can sometimes search online to find a specific journal's impact factor.

No single metric of measuring impact is perfect and there is some controversy with Impact Factor. Some concerns are due to:

• IF only using quantitative information
• IF only using citations by indexed journals
• IF favoring journals with basic or summary information, as that is what is most commonly cited in many fields
• A journal article can have influence without being cited
• IF generally does not count citations by international sources