FULL TEXT DATABASE

Provides bibliographic information, usually an abstract and the full text of the item which may be printed or downloaded.

CITATION DATABASES

Provides citation data, bibliographic details, and sometimes an abstract (summary) or full text of the item. Citation Indexes are a key research tool, providing access to multidisciplinary literature from high impact research journals.

Start your citation searching with:

• Web of Knowledge
• Google Scholar
• Scopus

The Journal Impact factor

• a statistical measure of a journal's influence and impact on the global research community
• often used as a factor in deciding allocations of public funding for research
• journals may be referred to as "high-impact", based on their impact factor ranking
• should be viewed and interpreted cautiously, and for individual journal titles relative to other titles within the discipline, rather than in isolation

Use Impact Factors to

• identify highly ranked journals to read and in which to publish
• confirm the status of journals in which you have published
• identify journals relevant to your research

MEASURING YOUR RESEARCH IMPACT

MEASURING JOURNAL IMPACT

• Journal Citation Reports (JCR)

Provided by Thomson Reuters; traditional source of impact factors for journals.

Impact Factor (IF) = average number of times that articles published in a specific journal in the two previous years (e.g. 2000-01) were cited in a particular year (i.e. 2002)

Impact Factors may be obtained for individual journals or for all journals within a subject category or edition within the Journal Citation Reports

• Eigenfactor

A free alternative to journal ranking, based on the network created by citations and footnotes. The Eigenfactor score of a journal is an estimate of the probability of a library user accessing that journal by following references.

CITATION DATA AND WEB ANALYSIS

 Times Cited or No. of Downloads

A number of databases provide quality citation data about individual papers. They show whom has cited an original paper, when and where, providing an opportunity to learn about other researchers within or related to a discipline as well as illustrating "impact" of that paper.

• Web of Science

A multi-discipline index of peer-reviewed, high-impact journals and key source of citation data, enabling authors of a cited article to analyse the impact of their research.

• Scopus

This indexes multi-discipline peer-reviewed sources, including journal articles, conference proceedings and trade publications. Citation data may be downloaded and analysed for individual authors using Citation Tracker.

• Google Scholar

Google Scholar includes citation data that may provide links not found through Web of Science or Scopus. For example, it will pick up citations on academic web pages. Offers a convenient way for following up the citing articles.

h-Index, g-Index, hc-Index and others

Analysis of citation data, rather than just its collection, has become a value-added service of some databases now.

h-index

• Measures impact / research contribution of individual or group of researchers
• h-index of 15, for example, means that there are 15 items that have been cited 15 or more times
• Value will only increase over period of researcher's career
• Can only compare h-indices of researchers in same field
• In Web of Science, the Citation Report includes the h-index
• More information about the h-index

g-index

• Introduced as an improvement of the h-index which "is insensitive to one or several outstandingly highly cited papers" (Gibbs, 2006, p.31)
• Measures the global citation performance of set of articles
• If set is ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received (together) at least g² citations.
• A set of papers has a g-index of g if g is the highest rank, such that the top g papers have, together, at least g²citations
• More information about g-index

Contemporary h-index (hc-index)

• Based on the h-index, with an age-related weighting to each cited article
• More information about hc-index

Publish or Perish

• a computer program that analyses data from Google Scholar
• reveals h-index, g-index and average numbers of citations per author, paper, year etc.
• enables comparison between these data and those for the same author(s), found in Scopus and Web of Science.

RESEARCHER IDENTITY

Establishing a unique researcher identity is an important step to improving your research impact.  There are a variety of options for creating a unique identity, with ORCID being the latest development. ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers.  ORCID is well supported by many publishers including:

• American Physical Society - The American Physical Society, membership organization for physics in the United States and publisher of the Physical Review journals, encourages all active physicists to register with ORCID. 
• Thomson Reuters - ResearcherID members are able to register and link to ORCID profiles from their ResearcherID Profile
• ORCID

ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.

• Researcher ID

ResearcherID.com is a freely available resource for the global, multi-disciplinary scholarly research community. 
ResearcherID allows you to create an online Profile for showcasing your publication history.

How to convert the Thesis or Dissertation into a Journal Article

DATA REPOSITORY

Databib
Databib is a tool for helping people identify and locate online repositories of research data. It indexes repositories alphabetically and by subject.

ELECTRONIC THESIS & DISSERTATION

REFERENCING SOFTWARE

Following are the available reference software:

My EndNote Web

BibTeX

Mendeley

Papers

REFERENCING STYLE MANUAL

APA Reference Style

MLA Reference Style

Chicago Reference Style

Harvard Referencing Style