Publication Metrics

Elements hosts all University of Sussex academic staff profiles. Profile pages include details of researcher's publication and incorporates two types of metrics:

• Citation count- using data from the Dimensions database
• Altmetrics

Like the other metrics identified in this guide, citation and Altmetrics can only offer a partial picture when it comes to assessing the work of a researcher. Developing your Elements profile can help build a more complete picture. 

Elements integrates with a number of Author Identifiers such as ORCiD. Author Identifiers can uniquely identify you and link your research activity to you, increasing the visibility of your research (and potential to attract citations) in addition to other benefits (such as reducing data entry by providing options for seamless data transfer between systems).

Selecting a journal

Selecting the most appropriate journal, which will reach the broadest and most appropriate audience for your research is essential to ensuring the maximum potential for citation of your published research. Some of the metrics in this guide can help inform decision making, but should be balanced with a researchers knowledge of the field. A useful rule of thumb is to aim to publish in the journals you regularly read. 

Discovery

The title and abstract you select for your article can have two immediate affects on the discoverability of your research, and thus the potential for your work to be found, read and cited.

Publisher's often offer guidance on structure, length and format of titles. Some simple key tips to consider might include:-

• Ensuring your title is clear and describes what the research is about

• Consider what keywords a reader might be looking for (both terms entered in to a search query, and keywords that might leap out from a list of titles on a page when a reader scans down their results list), and ensure that at least some of them are included in the title itself.

• If you want to promote your publication via social media, remember services like Twitter apply a character limit!

• Avoid puns, proverbs and pop-culture references, all of which may exclude potential readers.

Open Access 

[See our Open Research support pages here]

Open access can increase the accessibility, discoverability, and visibility of a research output. It enables researchers to more easily share their work and promote it effectively via online media (as anyone with an internet connection is able to link through to the full text, and won't face a paywall barrier if they don't have subscription access).

Author Affiliation

Make sure that you, and your university and department, receive appropriate credit and attribution for your publications. It is not uncommon for publications to be incorrectly attributed to the wrong author or institution based on incorrect or ambiguous author information included in the original article.

• Use a consistent form for your name, and consider the implications of how any change of name  will impact on the ability of readers and automated systems to correctly identify your publications output.

• Consider registering for an ORCiD which provides a unique identifier that you can use on article submissions and grant applications. 

• Generating a profile on Google Scholar not only increases the visibility of your research output (by altering your name in the author credits into a hyperlink to your profile and other publications) but also allows you to track citations to your work identified in Google Scholar.