Scholarly Metrics Resources for Pepperdine Authors

Scholarly Metrics Concepts Covered & Services Provided by the Library:  

•  Raising the visibility of your research (see also Open Access)
•  Journal Selection/Credibility
• Scholarly Impact
  •  Altmetrics 
• Open Access

Raising the visibility of your research: This is about the importance of creating profiles and self-archiving/sharing work ethically (aka not violating copyright) 

• Pepperdine Libraries’ Digital Commons hosts research works from the Pepperdine community. Digital Commons can increase the readership of your articles and provide metrics. Most importantly, you can take advantage of green open access to upload the full-text of your accepted manuscripts after the embargo periods of journal publishers.
• Importance of creating ORCID, ResearchGate and Google Scholar author profiles.

Journal Selection: There are many considerations when selecting a journal.

• Is the journal legitimate? 
  • There are many predatory publishers that target faculty with flattering emails that entice them to submit manuscripts with promises of quick turnaround times. 
    

• Is the journal prestigious? 
  • While the Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate is the most famous, other resources like SCIMago and CiteScore rank journals by often their articles or cited. 
• Is the journal a good fit for your research?
  • It’s worth exploring the scope of the journal, whether articles on similar topics have been published, and the research methodologies of published articles. 
• Publication timeline?
  •  If you are applying for tenure in five months, it’s risky to submit your article to a journal that takes three to four months to review manuscripts
• Acceptance rates? 
  • The percentage of articles accepted for publication can be helpful if you are under pressure to publish your article in a timely manner. 

Scholarly Impact: Metrics will help you gauge the impact of your work which is  helpful for promotion and tenure as well as self-evaluation. Metrics fall into four main categories Author, Artifact, Journal, and Institution level metrics.  Bellow are examples of questions you can answer with metrics: 

• Artifact Level Metrics: How many times has your work been cited?
• Authors Level Metrics: What is your impact as an author? Is the H-Index an appropriate metric?
• Journal Level Metric: What is this journal's ranking?  (journal ranking is calculated by how many times their articles were cited.)
• Institution Level Metrics: What is the overall research productivity of your department/division; how do these metrics compare to peer departments at other institutions?

Open Access: Open access articles generally receive more citations and enjoy a higher readership. Are you aware that there are several levels of open access? 

• Our guide explains the varying levels of open access

Raising the visibility of your research

Why should you create multiple profiles and how do these platforms help you achieve your goals? 

Answer:

Creating a free Google Scholar Author profile will organize all of your scholarly works in one location and make it easier for other researchers to locate your papers. Also, by creating a profile, you can obtain author level metrics like the H-index.

ORCID is a unique alphanumeric identifier for authors; it helps with name ambiguity for common surnames and will be invaluable if you change names. Researchers can include their ORCID id’s when they apply for grants. Over 7,000 journals collect ORCID ids when authors submit articles and journals like PLOS and Science require ORCID ids for article submissions.

ResearchGate is an academic social network and is useful for sharing your works with other scholars. 

• Important copyright information: In most cases you can upload pre-prints (the version of the article prior to peer review) to ResearchGate, but you cannot upload later versions of the article that incorporate peer review).

Green Open Access-This category, which is also known as self-archiving, provides authors with the option of uploading the full-text of published articles that are hidden behind paywalls to institutional repositories.