Metrics for promotions, grants and awards

How to select and use metrics to strengthen applications for promotions, grants and awards.

Update researcher profiles

Make sure your profiles are up-to-date. This is important because incomplete profiles can negatively affect your metrics.

This includes:

What to do:

  • Search for yourself on these platforms.
  • Create accounts and claim any profiles or IDs that were automatically created.
  • Merge duplicate profiles where possible.
  • Make sure only your publications are listed.
  • Add any missing publications to all relevant profiles.
  • Link your ORCID to all your other profiles.

For more details, go to Find and update your research profiles (PDF).

Pick the right metrics

Choose metrics that best show the quantity, quality, and impact of your research. There are lots of metrics out there, so pick the ones that fit your needs.

What to do:

  • Highlight important publications, such as those with innovative ideas, high impact or public recognition.
  • Select the best metrics to describe the qualities of your research you have been asked to demonstrate, such as article or journal influence and prestige, your performance as an author, your collaborations or impact beyond academia.

Common metrics by impact theme

Most influential or highest quality publications

  • Highly cited and/or hot papers
  • Who is citing your work
  • Journal impact indicators
  • Metrics for non-traditional outputs

Author prominence or comparison against others in your field (aka benchmarking)

  • Top citation and journal percentiles
  • Author ranking within a subject area
  • Author ranking in a SciVal topic
  • Comparing metrics with other researchers in your field

Collaboration

  • International, national or institutional collaboration
  • Academic or industry collaboration

Influence outside of academia

  • Mentions in policy documents, news, blogs and social media
  • Open access publications
  • UN Sustainable Development Goals
  • Patent citation metric

If you have non-traditional outputs, consider using other ‘non-traditional’ metrics, such as reviews, awards, or the prestige of publishers, venues, or organisers.

For more details, go to Selecting your outputs and metrics (PDF).

Collect metrics from databases

Once you have decided which metrics to use, collect them from the relevant sources. As a University researcher, you have access to the following databases and repositories:

Open-source metrics databases:

For more details, see the Collecting metrics guide (PDF).

Incorporate metrics into your narrative statements

After updating your researcher profiles and collecting your metrics from the databases, it is time to incorporate them into your narrative statement. This is your chance to contextualise your chosen metrics and explain how they help represent your influence on the academic field.

For different metrics, outputs or impact themes, go to Narrative statement examples.

For support with metrics collection, contact the Library via Ask us.

For more information on promotion processes and applications, visit Academic promotion (staff intranet).

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