The University of Michigan system maintains a database to ensure that our faculty members get the recognition they deserve as experts in their fields. This database, Michigan Research Experts, is currently working to on-board all the faculty members on the Dearborn campus. It will have profiles for each faculty member where you can track your impact in the academy and connect with others here at the University who are working in other fields and may have interests which intersect with your own. By activating your profile and ensuring the correctness and completeness of your record you will become more visible to others both inside and outside the University. This will help you to demonstrate your expertise in your field and to make cross-disciplinary connections with your colleagues.
Work is ongoing on this page. If you have any questions, comments or suggests please email Amy at aseipke@umich.edu
Essential Science Indicators - Shows "hot topics" and "hot papers" those that are currently the most cited. These can help you find collaborators or see how popular your topics are in current research.
Michigan Research Experts - To find researchers within the University system in areas of interest, you can search by topic in the database.
Publishing in Open Access publications is a great way of extending the impact of your academic research. Additionally, many funding agencies require your final product to be released to the public and open access publishing is one way that can be accomplished while maintaining the integrity and credibility.
More people can access your research when it is open access and not trapped behind a paywall. This leads to:
The key difference between the traditional publishing model and and the open access (OA) publishing model is in the way they are funded.
In traditional publishing the costs are covered by subscriptions or access fees. These are often hundreds or sometimes even thousands of dollars and severely limit who can read the articles or access the data. As a member of the University of Michigan-Dearborn community, your access to many of these journals is paid for by the Mardigian Library, but for those outside the University without membership to another large institution there is no way to (legally) read these articles.
The OA or Open Access publication model aims to open up academic research to a wider audience. Therefore costs for these journals are covered by funders at the point of creation instead of being foisted on the readers. OA publishers charge a publishing fee or a APC (article processing fee) to cover their costs. As researchers, you have access to funding avenues that are not available to all readers. Often these fees are covered by the agency funding the research. The University also covers or reduces the APC for some publications through our Library subscription agreements (see the link to the list below). There may also be funding through your department so check there as well before paying the APC out of pocket.
For a list of OA publication agreements that the Mardigian Library has negotiated, click HERE.
For a list of data sharing requirements by federal funding agency, click HERE.
Many private funders, including the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation, also have open access polies as well so be sure to check the terms of your funding and contact the Library if you need any help.
A list of (and access to) many reputable scholarly OA journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
As members of the University of Michigan community, you also have access to add your publications to Deep Blue and/or to add your data to the Deep Blue Data Repository which allow for open access to your work.
Below are some resources that may help you identify journals where you can publish in your field:
The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating how many times its articles are cited.
Journal Citation Reports (VPN required for off-campus access)
Ensure that you are getting proper credit for your work and making the most impact with your research by using a persistent digital Identifier such as ORCiD. With ORCiD you can reduce the risk of attribution errors and ensure that your professional works are all attributed correctly. Because ORCiD is free to use, you can use your ORCiD account to maintain information about your body of work across all institutions and you can share your ORCiD with those outside your home institution to allow access to your complete Curriculum Vitae.
We all know that links can break over time. This can be particularly troublesome when the link to something you have written breaks and you can no longer find the article you worked so hard on. Using a DOI (digital object identifier) can help provide a more stable link to an article or other digital object. A DOI is a handle that has location metadata attached to it in a standardized way managed by ISO and the organization that grants the DOI. Using these DOIs, whenever possible, makes linking to your work much easier and reduces the risk of your links become broken over time. This tool is a free DOI lookup that you can use to find these more stable links for an article that you may want to reference (your own or someone else's).
There are many ways to measure your "impact" as an academic. There may be some metrics that work better to capture the true impact of a researcher in a specific field over other ways, there may be a particular way required by a specific funding agency, or your review committee may require a specific metric. If you need to find your impact score in specific way that is not covered below please feel free to contact me and I will help you find the resources you need.
One of the most commonly used way to measure impact is using the h-index, or Hirsch index [1]. This is a number intended to represent both the productivity and the impact of a particular scientist or scholar, or a group of scientists or scholars (such as a departmental or research group). The h-index is calculated by sorting the publications for which an author has been cited by other authors by how many times they have been cited. Then the number of papers cited at least the same number of times as its position on the list are counted. For instance, an h-index of 17 means that the scientist has published at least 17 papers that have each been cited at least 17 times. If the scientist's 18th most cited publication was cited only 10 times, the h-index would remain at 17. If the scientist's 18th most cited publication was cited 18 or more times, the h-index would rise to 18.
[1]J. E. Hirsch, “An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 102, no. 46, pp. 16569–16572, Nov. 2005, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0507655102.
Each database of journal articles or eBooks will only be able to search the articles or eBooks it has in its holdings, therefore you will get many different results when you search for your impact score within them. These are some of the places you can look to find your impact measured in various way and pulled from various sources. Once faculty from the Dearborn campus are loaded into the Michigan Research Experts Database, you will be able to keep your own information complete and up to date regardless of where it is published. It will give you a much more complete picture of your impact in one stop!
Web of Science calculates how many times your articles or book chapters (published since 2005 in periodicals which are part of Web of Science) have been cited:
Google Scholar calculates how many times your articles or books (but not book chapters) have been cited:
Scopus - Author Search calculates the h-index for articles within the database which were published since 1996. Off-campus access requires that you login to the VPN before beginning.
SciVal Research Summary
For more information on publishing see THIS GUIDE from UM-Ann Arbor Libraries
