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Measuring Research Impact

Tracking the Impact of your Research Data

Why measure the impact of Research Data?

Tracking the Impact/attention of your Research Data​

Data usage monitoring ​

Identifying if data has been useful to other researchers?​

Showcase the difference it is making both within the academic community and beyond​

Measuring online attention ​​

Showing the dissemination of your research​

Showing how your data was used to derive new knowledge​

Identifying the incorporation of your data into larger datasets or data products;​

Showing the use of your software or workflows ​

Research Data Impact Measures

What do Data Metrics look like?

  • Data citations and Altmetrics for data​

    • Data citations are an attempt to track data’s influence and reuse in scholarly literature​

    • Altmetric show the attention score data is receiving online​

  • Data Citations​

    • Citing the "data package" directly (often by pointing to where the data is hosted in a repository) ​

    • Citing a “data paper” that describes the dataset, functioning primarily as detailed metadata

Data Papers

  • Datasets are increasingly being recognized as scholarly products in their own right​

  • Data papers facilitate the sharing of data in a standardized framework that provides value, impact, and recognition for authors.​

  • Data papers also provide much more thorough context and description than datasets that are simply deposited to a repository (with Metadata))​

  • Do not usually include any interpretation or discussion​

  • May be included as part of a standard journal or in a Data journal​

  •  Provide quick access to high-quality datasets that are of broad interest to the scientific community. They are intended to facilitate reuse of the dataset, which increases its original value and impact, and speeds the pace of research by avoiding unintentional duplication of effort.​

  • Data Journals usually Peer Reviewed​

  • For example, "Earth System Science Data" ​

Web of Science Data Citation Index

Scopus (filter for Data Paper Citations)

Altmetric Explorer Attention Scores

Tracking the Impact of your Research Data: The Tools available

Data Journals

Data journals are scholarly journals that publish datasets or data papers.Data journals focus on the publication of data papers -- a specialized publication type describing datasets, their collection and reuse potential that is peer-reviewed, citable and indexed.

Open Data Journals

Finding Data Journals

Data Repositories