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!
Learning Outcomes:
Students will be able to:
- Describe and identify author and journal metrics
- Identify research interests and venues for publication
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.
