Use research (or publication) metrics when applying for a grant or promotion. Measures include citation metrics, journal quality indicators, benchmarking, altmetrics and collaboration.

8. Use metrics in grant applications

Metrics may indicate research quality and provide supporting evidence of claims that researchers make about their track record, contribution to a discipline, international profile or capacity to collaborate

Research metrics vary over time and between disciplines:

  • Always put your claims into context
  • Calculate regularly
  • Provide a source for your data

What metrics can you use?

  • Number of publications
  • Career citation count
  • Citations per publication
  • Percentage of publications cited
  • h-index

Refer back to the Bibliometric indicators section for an explanation of these metrics.

Other metrics include:

  • your level of collaboration
  • benchmarking — how your individual publications compare to similar publications 
  • journal quality
  • attention to articles beyond the scholarly community.

Your research areas

Analysing your publications in Web of Science and Scopus will tell you:

  • your main research areas
  • if your research spans into other research areas, indicating if your research is multidisciplinary.

Example


"My work is multidisciplinary - 34% of my articles are in the subject area of biochemistry, 29% in biophysics and 16% in oncology (Web of Science, 1/12/2024)"


Your collaboration

Find your level of collaboration by analysing your metrics in Web of Science and Scopus.

  • Do any publications have a corporate/industry author?
  • How many publications have a non-UQ or overseas author?

Example


“70% of my journal articles have non-UQ Australian based co-authors, with 15% of my papers involving international co-authors, including 3 papers with Harvard University co-authors (Web of Science, 1/12/2024)"


 

Metrics for grant applications has instructions on how to find and use metrics to provide evidence of your track record and top papers.

Contact the Librarian team for expert advice.

Learn how to track and measure your own metrics with the Metrics for grant or promotion applications online tutorial.

 

  Next steps

Use metrics to provide evidence of: