Want to increase the impact of your work? Check out 30-day impact challenge!
Challenge yourself to -
- create a Google Scholar profile
- consolidate scholarship under a single name (Hein)
- create an ORCID profile
- track citations & views
- learn about metrics
- engage using social media
- learn about OA
- publish in OA journals
Impact of open access (research)
Choosing the right metric
Believing the future of academic research is digital and interactive, this group seeks to identify new ways to measure research impact.
METRICS TOOLKIT
Helping You Navigate the Research Metrics Landscape
"The Metrics Toolkit is a resource for researchers and evaluators that provides guidance for demonstrating and evaluating claims of research impact. With the Toolkit you can quickly understand what a metric means, how it is calculated, and if it’s good match for your impact question."
Sponsored by Altmetrics, IUPUI and FORCE11 the project focuses on data-based research.
It helps to think of impact at four levels - article, journal, author, and law school.
Impact measures citations:
- court and secondary references to a specific article
- court and secondary references to all articles in a specific journal
- court and secondary references to all articles by a specific author (faculty)
- court and secondary references to all faculty at specific law school
Metrics look at the ratio of citations over time. The field of law generally measures impact over a rolling five year period.
Faculty Impact Factors
Author impact -
HeinOnline Author Impact Profile (issue: multiple names; proposed for USNWR faculty rankings)
Google Scholar Citations metrics (Author Profiles)
ImpactStory Profile Impact Story is a non-profit that creates software to promote open access scholarship. Their profiles software tracks a researcher's mentions in the news and in social media. Create a profile using your Twitter handle.
Altmetric includes "evidence of societal engagement, influence and broader impacts... including any recent publications that have not yet had a chance to accrue traditional citations", e.g., twitter, Facebook, reddit, blogs, etc., plus news media, Wikipedia, websites, books, and more.
PlumX (now owned by Elsevier) metrics count five separate categories: citations, usage, captures, mentions, and social media. Also used in bepress Digital Commons.
Citations – traditional citation indexes, as well as citations that help indicate societal impact such as Clinical or Policy Citations.
Usage – signals that someone read the article or otherwise used the research. Usage is the number one statistic researchers want to know after citations (e.g., clicks, downloads, views, library holdings, video plays). 
Captures – shows that someone wants to come back to the work, possibly indicating future citations (e.g., bookmarks, code forks, favorites, readers, watchers )
Mentions – measures references to the article in news articles or blog posts. Mentions is a way to tell that people are engaging with the research (e.g., blog posts, comments, reviews, Wikipedia references, news media.
Social media - includes the tweets, Facebook likes, etc. that reference the research; i.e., “buzz” and promotion.
HeinOnline Top 250 Authors
Law School Impact
Law school impact-
Brian Leiter, then Gregory Sisk, Law Rankings by Faculty Citations ("Faculty Quality")
USNews.com - may be similar to Leiter/Sisk with a five-year window (2014-2018); will add tenure-track faculty and use HeinOnline/Fastcase instead of Westlaw
Journal Impact Factors
Journal impact factor - measures the frequency with which the “average article” in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period; a ratio between citations and recent articles published. Usually the higher the better. For example, an Impact Factor of 1.0 means that, on average, the articles published in a given journal two to five years ago have been cited one time. An Impact Factor of 2.5 means that, on average, the articles published in the time period have been cited two and a half times.
Sources:
Washington & Lee Law School's Law Journal Submissions & Ranking
Allen Rostron & Nancy Levit, Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals
Most Cited Journals on HeinOnline
Bryce C. Newell Meta-Ranking of Flagship US Law Reviews 2018