Welcome to Challenge 7 of the WSU Research Impact Challenge!
Challenge 6 focused on what kinds of work you are doing. Challenge 7 looks at concrete ways the impact of that work might be measured, focusing on this question: How do you get from the work you do, to an appropriate metric for measuring and communicating its impact?
Let’s get started!
Here’s how to do it:
- Although not currently updated, the Metrics Toolkit, still contains valuable information in helping you to understand the research metrics landscape.
- You can browse the metrics, listed in alphabetical order in the left menu. All metrics include descriptions for what it is, how it works, things to keep in mind, where to learn more about it, and related metrics.
- Click on one or two of the suggested metrics and read about them to understand what the metric is, how it works and what to keep in mind as you decide whether it is a good metric for providing information about your research impact. As an example, the entry for “Blog Mentions” looks like this:
What next?
The Metrics Toolkit is a user-friendly introduction to identifying appropriate research impact metrics, but it’s not the only tool like this available. Check out Snowball Metrics for another approach to defining and identifying standardized, replicable, open, research impact metrics.
Learn more:
- In their review, “A narrative review of research impact assessment models and methods”, Milat et al. provide an overview of frameworks and methods of measuring research impact in applied in a subset of health sciences research published from 1990–2013.
- Duke ScholarWorks » Understanding Research Impact Metrics provides some brief overviews of the best-known metrics, caveats about using them, and references to many other resources where you can learn more.
Preparing for the next challenge:
You’ve completed Challenge 7 of WSU’s Research Impact Challenge! While completing this challenge, you may have noticed that the Metrics Toolkit groups all citation-based measures of impact together. Challenge 8 will dig into this category, looking at specific citation-based impact metrics, how to calculate them, and how to understand them in context.