Typical basic statistics may not reflect the most important aspects of your work. There are many statistics available, which can be used to highlight different aspects of your work. Areas such as impact or engagement with open science are becoming more important to demonstrate for certain applications (e.g. open science practices in Horizon Europe).

Example: An h-index of 12 could mean you have 12 publications cited 12 times each; or, you have 12 publications cited 300 times each! It "hides" your highly cited works. We also have no idea if these publications were open, if you were first author, or what kinds of publications they were.

Below you will find some suggestions for possible statistics. Note that reliable statistics are not available (or appropriate) for all publication types; for example, if your field is law and your publication list mostly consists of books, NOUs and lovkommentarer, you are relatively limited in what statistics are available/reliably indicate the impact of your work. However, if you work in medicine and mostly publish articles, you have more possibilities.

Later pages in the module will cover how and where to find these statistics.

Table of possible statistics and what they indicate
Possible statistics	What does it indicate something about?	For which publication types are these most appropriate/reliable for?*
Total number of publications Highlights: Number of publications... split by type (e.g. peer-reviewed, SR, books) in prestigious journals/series in your field¹ commissioned/invited where you have first/last authorship cross-disciplinary	Academic production	All
Total times cited Highlights Number of publications cited over x times Number of "highly cited papers" in Web of Science² Number of citations from a certain publication type, e.g. textbooks	Academic use of your works	Articles, books, chapters, proceedings, datasets, reports, policy documents, software/code, clinical guidelines
h-index	Academic use & production	Articles, books, chapters, proceedings
Times cited in policy documents Times mentioned in the news or social media Times cited in patents Numbers of other works that you produce, for example: Clinical guidelines, legislation, patents, policy or reports Datasets or software Outreach / popular publications	Societal contact, contribution to innovation	Citations in news/social media/policy: Articles, books, chapters, reports, popular articles Citations in patents: Articles, patents, conference proceedings Production: All
Number / % of publications published openly Open FAIR datasets / No. of publications connected to...³ Other open science outputs, e.g. open code, preprints, post-publication peer reviewing⁴	Engagement with open science	All
Number of countries/institutions co-authored with Cooperation with certain countries/categories	Your network; Global impact	All

- * Types in bold are where statistics should be available and relevant; for others, statistics are possibly relevant/available, but may have some limitations
- ¹Many funders and institutions have signed DORA (e.g. Research Council of Norway, European Research Council), and no longer consider journal level metrics (e.g. the impact factor) appropriate for assessment of individuals - see module 2 page on journal-level metrics for more information.
- ²Highly cited papers in Web of Science are articles that are in the top 1 % in terms of number of times cited, compared to other articles of the same age and field.
- ³More information about how and why make your research data open and FAIR can be found on the library's open data page.
- ⁴While many organisations support/require OS practices, double check before focusing on them - see Nature News article on rejection of applications with preprints (2021)

For more information about these statistics, see Module 2: About bibliometric indicators and statistics.