Assignment

Your Researcher Profile

Submitted by Tessa Withorn on February 23rd, 2023
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Short Description: 

How do you detmerine whether your research has had an impact? This lesson plan covers journal and author metrics such as Journal Impact Factors, H-index, citation counts, and altmetrics. After a mini-lecture of the definitions of these metrics and how to find them using Journal Citation Reports and Google Scholar Metrics, students create a researcher profile to position themselves as scholars. 

Supplies needed: Printed researcher profile handouts.

This activity takes approxiately 30 minutes.  

Directions: Identify a university or research center you’d want to be affiliated with, and make up a title of an article you’d be interested in writing. Then, find a real journal that would publish that article. Use Google Scholar to look up the journal’s h-index and Ulrich’s to determine if it’s open access. Make up a number for how many times you think the article would be cited!

Attachments: 
AttachmentSize
Your Researcher Profile.pdfdisplayed 181 times61.62 KB
Learning Outcomes: 

Students will be able to:

  • Describe and identify author and journal metrics
  • Identify research interests and venues for publication 
Discipline: 
Multidisciplinary

Information Literacy concepts:

Individual or Group:

Course Context (e.g. how it was implemented or integrated): 

This activity was used in a GE course, BIOL 203: Scientific Information Litearcy and Communication course, but could be useful in a variety of disciplines and with graduate students.  

Additional Instructor Resources (e.g. in-class activities, worksheets, scaffolding applications, supplemental modules, further readings, etc.): 
Potential Pitfalls and Teaching Tips: 

Make sure all students can find the h-index of a journal in Google Scholar and whether a journal is open access in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory before starting the activity. 

Emphasize that students are to come up with a creative title for their own research interests, not an existing article. 

Suggested Citation: 
Withorn, Tessa. "Your Researcher Profile." CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments), 2023. https://projectcora.org/assignment/your-researcher-profile.