Using publication metrics to highlight academic productivity and research impact
Open accessAbstract
This article provides a broad overview of widely available measures of academic productivity and impact using publication data and highlights uses of these metrics for various purposes. Metrics based on publication data include measures such as number of publications, number of citations, the journal impact factor score, and the h-index, as well as emerging metrics based on document-level metrics. Publication metrics can be used for a variety of purposes for tenure and promotion, grant applications and renewal reports, benchmarking, recruiting efforts, and administrative purposes for departmental or university performance reports. The authors also highlight practical applications of measuring and reporting academic productivity and impact to emphasize and promote individual investigators, grant applications, or department output.
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The number of publications over time is one of the most relevant factors as to how much scholars are interested in a specific topic, and is an indicator of the expansion of a field of research.
“The number of publications over time, or the growth trend, is one of the most relevant factors as to how much scholars are interested in a specific topic, and is an indicator of the expansion of a field of research [44,45,46].”
From Towards Green and Sustainable Healthcare: A Literature Review and Research Agenda for Green Leadership in the Healthcare Sector (2023) · cites this paper as [44]
The 'Number of Publications' section (page not specified) treats publication counts within a time frame as a measure of an investigator’s productivity. The grant-proposal example also counts publications in a research area over five years to identify a literature gap. Neither passage says that a topic’s publication growth measures scholars’ interest or indicates expansion of the field. (LLM, conf=0.79)
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- Authors
- Carpenter, C. R., Cone, D. C., & Sarli, C. C.
- Affiliations
- Washington University in St. Louis (US)
- Yale University (US)
- Venue
- Academic Emergency Medicine
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2014-10
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 1160-1172
- ISSN
- 1069-6563 (ISSN-L)
- 1553-2712
- PMC
- PMC4987709
- OpenAlex
- W2088433402
- Cited by
- 377
- References
- 74
- Citations by year
- 2026: 35 · 2025: 30 · 2024: 48 · 2023: 39 · 2022: 40 · 2021: 41 · 2020: 35 · 2019: 41 · 2018: 18 · 2017: 16 · 2016: 21 · 2015: 11 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 16.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Academic Emergency Medicine (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Digital Commons@Becker (Washington University School of Medicine) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (UL1TR000448)
- National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychology Research and Bibliometrics
- Keywords
- publication metrics, academic productivity, research impact, citation analysis, journal impact factor, h-index, tenure and promotion, grant applications, research benchmarking, academic recruitment
- MeSH terms
- Authorship, Humans, Periodicals as Topic, Publishing, Bibliometrics, Peer Review, Research, Biomedical Research, Journal Impact Factor
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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