Library Research Support Services
Tools & tips for boosting citations, promoting your published research and yourself as researcher in a digital world.
Promoting your research and your digital research profile
- DOIs are trackable through tools such as Altmetric, PlumX (for news & policy citations) and bibliometric analysis tools.
- DOIs are a permanent identifier with the DOI provider maintaining a registry of directed urls DOIs point to
- If your work is UoP published, e.g. a thesis/report/dataset, the Library can mint a DOI via Pure which will be sent with your file to PEARL, the university's open access research repository
- Be sure to use the DOI in all digital mentions of your work otherwise it cannot be tracked
Kudos is a free service for individual authors that can be used to effectively communicate your research within and outside of academia to help increase the visibility of your research, and monitor and track the wider impact through citation and altmetric data.
You may find that your chosen journal has already partnered with Kudos and will facilitate this for you.
"What is Kudos? A brief introduction", March 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoQE4exULhM
The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, authored by academics and edited by journalists for the general public. Articles are published under a Creative Commons license and free to read.
The Conversation's guidance stipulates that articles should be:
- Of interest to a general audience - what does a lay person want or need to know?
- Timely - analysis of something in the news, commentary pegged to historic anniversaries: 'why should a reader care now?'
- Written by an academic expert in the subject
- 1,000 words or fewer
To be published by The Conversation you must be currently employed as a researcher or academic with a university or research institution. PhD candidates under supervision by an academic are also eligible.
UoP Conversation articles and authors
"How we work at The Conversation", May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ0iDbxNsTs&t=121s
Creating an accessible online presence for your research outputs which goes hand in hand with increased visibility. Identifiers connect publications, authors, institution & funders to minimise manual update and auto-populate profiles, saving authors time.
You can visit our guidance on Online Identifiers to find advice on creating and keeping online profiles up-to-date:
ORCiD and Open Peer Review
To further promote your wider research activities, ORCiD will auto-update with some publishers' reviewing systems:
Tracking your publication impact through citation metrics
Altmetrics
Citations in traditional scholarly publications can take time to appear in the published record whereas Altmetrics provide insight into who else is reading, sharing, discussing or commenting on your work right now, outside of traditional publication channels.
This can be useful for knowing who is talking about your research and could potentially help identify future academic and non-academic collaborations. These insights may also help with determining a pathway to wider impact with your research.
There are two main sources of Altmetrics data, PlumX and Altmetric. Each is available free to individuals at the article level.
- Install free Altmetric bookmarkletWhen visiting your article on the publisher site, click the Altmetric link in your bookmarks for a pop up donut score
- Example of PlumX record for an articleTo see PlumX data for your record, simply change the url suffix for your own DOI
Citation metrics
Citation metricsWeb of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar highlight the number of times a paper has been cited by other papers and enable you to keep up to date with who is formally citing your work.
Important to know: Each tool will generate a different figure for the same paper due to different source data.
Databases will attempt to normalise and contextualise these numbers:
- Web of Science will identify both
'hot papers in field' (new papers) and 
'highly cited in field' in your search hits - Web of Science also states a 'usage count' of the times the record has been viewed in Web of Science
- Scopus gives a field-weighted citation for each citation count
'hot papers in field' (new papers) and 
'highly cited in field' in your search hits
Author metrics
Author metrics
The H-index is the main author metric. It is a quantitative metric based on analysis of publication and citation data.
The H-index is defined as follows: “A scientist has index h if h of his or her Np papers have at least h citations each and the other (Np – h) papers have ≤h citations each". For example, if you have 8 papers that have each been cited at least 8 times (and the rest of your papers have been cited <8 times), your H-index is 8.
The H-index was created by Jorge Hirsch, who spoke of its limitations:
H-Index caveats
- Databases such as Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar can calculate an H-Index. Each databases has their own source list of indexed titles which citations are calculated from, so the H-index generated by each tool will be different for the same researcher.
- Disciplinary differences in citation practice require normalisation and context before assessing 'value.' e.g. the lifespan of articles, the coverage of the research topic within the source plus the rate of publication in a subject area all mean that h indexes only really have a context when compared with others in the same subject.
- Early Career Researchers and researchers who have taken career breaks can be disadvantaged when compared against other researchers using the H-Index.
- Self citations will increase the H-index (some information sources such as Web of Science will indicate self citations).
- Negative citations: There can be concern that citation counts can be generated by review and evaluation of the research which could ultimately lead to papers being withdrawn or retracted.
- You should always feel confident to question why you are being asked to provide your h-index, as it may not be appropriate or relevant as an indicator of your research or productivity potential.
But if you do want to know your H-index...
- ScopusAn author search will show an author's profile and H-Index.
- Web of ScienceAn author search will show an author's profile and H-Index.
Can you improve the accuracy of your H-Index?
Web of Science and Scopus automatically generate profiles for authors where work is indexed in their databases. See our separate guidance on managing author profiles if you need to make amendments or claim these system generated profiles:
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