Skip to Main Content

Research metrics help guide

Metrics for Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education researchers

For Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education researchers, research metrics are available quickly and easily through the research metrics dashboard and your author profile. There are 3 key places for author profiles:

Scopus and Web of Science each index a list of specific journals. Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education topics are covered in both databases so you will likely find at least some of your journal article publications included in your profile, although coverage might not be as strong compared to some Health and Science topics. There is more limited coverage of books, book chapters, and conference papers - but you may find that some of these publications are included here too. Google Scholar can be a helpful extra tool as its search engine usually finds more publications and citations from across the web.

 

Alert

To work with most of the metrics described in this guide, you will need to update and maintain your author profiles regularly. Author profiles are the foundation for bibliometric analysis.

Check out the Author profiles guide for further information and instructions on how to maintain and update your author profiles.

Click on the plus (+) icons below to discover metrics you could inyour application.


Impact of policies, patents and news

It can be useful to know if your research has been cited in any policy documents, patents, or the news. Altmetric.com captures this data for publications with a DOI, and the quickest way to access it is via Elements:

  1. Log in to Deakin Elements
  2. View your publication list by selecting Menu > Publications
  3. Select metrics from the focus on drop-down list
  4. Scroll down the list to see the Altmetric “donuts” and look out for purple stripes (policy) and light red stripes (news) or orange stripes (patents).

Caution

While the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) may be helpful for evaluating the influence of journals within a particular subject area, it should not be used to measure the quality of an individual article, or the impact of a researcher. It has been used this way in the past, but bibliometrics experts discourage it, and recommend more appropriate article and author-level metrics.