Research Impact Services

The University Libraries provides research impact services and tools to support CMU students, researchers, and staff measure the impact of published research based on various metrics. These services are designed to support researchers in telling the full story of the impact of their work, whatever the audience: colleagues, assessment bodies, funders, lawmakers, and members of the public.

Our support goes beyond metrics to foster meaningful engagement with scholarship across disciplines and communities. We offer:

• Individualized consultations to assess and interpret research impact using citation analysis, altmetrics, and bibliometric tools.
• Departmental and institutional impact reviews to support strategic planning, benchmarking, and evaluation
• Guidance on increasing research visibility through open access, persistent identifiers, and researcher profiles.
• Tools for mapping collaboration networks and understanding the influence of your work across academic and public spheres.

Impact Report Services

Research Impact Support Form

Department or unit-level analyses are a significant lift, particularly when they involve benchmarking. If you are interested in collaborating with us in this way, you will need to provide the Research Impact Team with a copy of this file with each person who should be included in the report. It may take up to 4 weeks to generate the report depending on the type of request and size of group.

Research Impact Reports for a Department or Unit
Work with the Research Impact Team to analyze and visualize your research group's scholarly output, impact, and collaboration networks.

The Research Impact Team can create research impact reports for a department, unit, or group. Our team provides customized bibliometric analyses, research performance indicators, and interactive visualizations to help identify emerging research trends, potential collaborators, and funding opportunities.

To utilize this service, please submit a request via this form and someone from the team will reach out to set up an initial meeting.

Please note: to proceed with any analytics request, you will need to provide the Research Impact Team with a copy of this file with each person who should be included in the report. It will take up to 4 weeks to generate the report depending on the type of request and size of group.

Types of Reports / Metrics Available

• Citation-based metrics: Including total citation counts, recent citations, and normalized metrics like Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and Relative Citation Ratio (RCR).
• Benchmarking reports: These reports allow for the comparison of research performance across different institutions, departments, or individual researchers.
• Alt- metrics: Alternative metrics includes metrics that measure the broader societal impact and online attention of research outputs. They track mentions in news media, social media, blogs, and policy documents, providing a quantitative and qualitative view of public engagement.
• Collaboration analysis: This type of report identifies and visualizes research partnerships and co-authorship networks, revealing a research entity's most active collaborators and opportunities for future partnerships.
• Scholarly output: These reports provide metrics on the volume of publications, including articles, books, and conference papers, to evaluate the productivity of a research group or institution.

Training and Self-service Tools

Training
The Research Impact Team offers workshops and consultations for anyone interested in learning about the tools available for capturing an individual's or group’s research activity.

Tools
A variety of tools to track research activity and impact are available to the CMU community.

• Dimensions: A comprehensive research database and analytics tool that connects publications, grants, patents, clinical trials, and policy documents to provide a holistic view of research performance and trends.
• SciVal: A web-based platform that leverages the Scopus database to analyze research performance, identify strengths, benchmark against peers, and discover collaboration opportunities for institutions and individual researchers.
• Altmetric Explorer: Uses "alternative metrics" by tracking the online attention a research output receives from non-traditional sources such as news media, social media, blogs, and policy documents, providing a measure of its broader societal impact.