Citations and Research Impact
Citations (when another researcher references your research) are increasingly being used by Universities, funding bodies and others as a measure of the impact of research. Citations are tracked by a number of databases, SCOPUS and Google Scholar being the key ones.
See more information on ways to improve your citation rate below.
Further information: Citation tools quickstart guide (pdf)
Link your research with ORCID
ORCID links all your research to a unique ID that can be used across a number of systems. Many authors end up with articles published with their name in a variety of formats, e.g. John Smith, J Smith, JM Smith, John M Smith. Some databases may not link these, or they may be mixed up with other authors with similar names. ORCID solves this problem for you.
Registering for ORCID is free and fast. ORCID can be used with databases as SCOPUS and is becoming a de-facto standard for publishers, funders and Universities. You can link your publications to ORCID using the instructions on the ORCID website.
Choose where and how you publish
You can use tools such as Journals and Highly Cited Data (formerly known as the Journal Citation Reports) to find the impact factor of a journal. Or, you can use the compare journals function within Scopus to find which journals receive the most citations within a subject area.
Making your research available as open access means that it is open to anyone, and there is evidence that the increased readership leads to higher citation counts.
Write clear titles and abstracts
As most research is now discovered through a search engine, it is important that your title clearly indicates the content of your research. It should make the topic obvious to searchers who may spend only a few seconds to decide if they want to read an article. Similarly a clear, well-structured abstract may also help your article rank better in searches and lead more people to go to the full text.
The LSE Impact blog has a couple of very good posts on this:
Google Scholar Profiles
Google Scholar is widely used around the world to locate academic research. You can set up a free profile page to link your citations and display your H index very quickly and promote your research in searches.
Kudos
Kudos helps you to promote your published work via email and social media, and track the impact this has within social media and on citation rates. Registration is quick, and you can use your ORCID to import your publications.
What is Kudos? A brief introduction
Please see the video below for an introduction to Kudos and how it can help with your work: