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Scholarly Publishing

Increasing and Demonstrating your Impact

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

Increasing Impact

  • Upload accepted manuscripts or pre-prints into the Institutional Repository so your work is publicly accessible
  • Retain your rights to reuse your work when you publish (Use the SPARC author addendum)
  • Add your work to citation platforms like Mendeley and Zotero
  • Use social media sites like X, Google Scholar, LinkedIn or ResearchGate to publicize your research

Journal Impact Factor

  • Sometimes university departments use Journal Impact Factors as a way to evaluate the quality of articles. 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

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

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