Traditional research metrics

What do we mean by research metrics? 

Research metrics are ways of measuring the impact of research – how many times it has been read and/or cited by others. There are three types of research metrics:

• Those that measure the impact of the journal the research is published in (the Journal Impact Factor)
• Those that measure the impact of the individual researcher (citation analysis in various forms)
• Altmetrics, where use of social media and other forms of dissemination are measured to indicate the impact of an article and/or its authors.

We will look at altmetrics later in this module, but for now let’s examine some of the forms of traditional research metrics.

Traditional research metrics use numbers to measure the impact of research. 

Infographic of traditional metrics 

Problems with traditional metrics

The Padlet below shows the many problems with traditional metrics. Read the Padlet to learn about these issues and see why traditional metrics can be biased, unfair and inaccurate.