Skip to Main Content

Research Impact: Citations and Metrics

This guide outlines tools and strategies to help you discover the impact of your research.

Metrics for Grants & Promotions Applications

When applying for grants and promotions, you will need to show evidence of your publication history, research performance and impact.

Essential Science Indicators can be a good place to start as it uses Web of Science data to identify top performing research and emerging trends.

Search by Research Fields, Authors, Institutions, Journals, Countries/Regions or Research Fronts and refine results to Top Papers, Highly Cited Papers or Hot Papers.

Other examples of evidence to support your grant or promotion application include:

At CSIRO, obtaining a citation analysis from the Research Publications Repository (RPR) and the Web Of Science database will help you to demonstrate the impact of your research.

Citation Analysis

Citation analysis is a quantitative method used to evaluate the scholarly impact and influence of research publications and involves analysing the number of times a publication is cited by other researchers.

The process of citing a previous publication in a new research paper acknowledges the influence and relevance of the cited work in shaping the current study.

A citation analysis can provide valuable insights into various aspects of scholarly research, including:

  1. Research Impact: how widely a publication has been read and referenced.

  2. Author Influence: a measurement of the impact of individual researchers, often referred to as the 'h-index'.

  3. Journal Rankings: the relative importance and prestige of academic journals in their respective fields.

  4. Research Trends: the frequency of citations over time can reveal emerging trends within a field of study.

  5. Interdisciplinary Connections: identification of connections between different academic disciplines and dissemination of ideas across various fields.

  6. Collaboration Patterns: insights into collaborations among researchers, as co-authored papers often cite each other's work.

Create an RPR Citation Report

You can use the Research Publications Repository (RPR) to create a citation report containing the publications you have produced while at CSIRO to support your promotions and grant applications.

  1. Log onto the RPR using your CSIRO credentials.
  2. Select My publications from the top of screen to view all of your CSIRO publications.

If any publications are missing, your ident may not be associated with them so get in touch with the library and we can help to add your ident to all of your publications.

  1. Check through the list and select the records that you want to appear in your citation list.
  2. As you make your selections, a pop-up will appear indicating that the records will temporarily remain in the Selected records box at the top of the screen. Press ESC to clear the message and return to the results list to continue selecting records.
  3. Your selections will be added to the Selected records box at the top of the screen where you can click to view the list.

  1. From the Select an action drop down, choose the format in which you want your citation list to appear, for example Word or Excel.

  1. The list will download and you can save it to your preferred destination (desktop, c: drive, etc).

Create a Web of Science Citation Report

At CSIRO, Web of Science is the main/corporate approved database used to measure citations in the scientific literature.

For a 10 year citation review, use the Web of Science All Databases search and for lifetime citation summaries, the Web of Science Cited Reference search may be more appropriate as this often results in higher numbers of citation results.

To create your Web of Science citation report:

  1. Log onto the Web of Science Core Collection and select the Researchers tab:

  1. Search for your publications using your, name, author identifier (ResearcherID or ORCID ID) or affiliation:

  1. From the results page, select View citation report from the right of the screen and export the full report: