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Scholarly Publishing

Increasing and Demonstrating your Impact

This page is intended to provide scholars with methods to make their publications more discoverable and help them demonstrate the reach of their work.

Increasing Impact

Journal Impact Factor

  • Sometimes university departments use Journal Impact Factors as a way to evaluate the quality of articles. This is not the way Eugene Garfield intended JIFs to be used. They are a measure of how well cited a journal is, not a measure of the quality of articles in that journal.
  • Here is a resource to learn more about JIFs: The History and Meaning of the Journal Impact Factor by Eugene Garfield, Journal of the American Medical Association

Book Impact

  • Use WorldCat to discover which libraries hold your book.
  • Was it reviewed? Where?
  • What are the sales figures?

H Index

  • "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." - J.E. Hirsch
  • Read more about Hirsch's H Index in "An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output"
  • To find an H Index, visit:
  • Critiques of the H Index:
    • Cannot be used to compare authors from different disciplines
    • Does not account for co-author order and varying contribution levels
    • Citations are not necessarily a measure of quality
    • Does not decrease when an author's productivity wanes

Altmetrics