Scientific Impact: How to Write High-Impact Research Paper

In this article, we will discuss the scientific impact of research papers and provide practical guidelines on writing a research paper capable of effectively reaching a broad research audience.

What is Research’s Impact?

The most direct definition of the word impact is “the force of impression of one thing on another.” In the context of academia, the notion of scientific impact retains the essence of this definition, affecting the scientific community or scientific knowledge. A research paper can have an impact by its popularity and/or prestige. Prestige, in the age of metadata, is usually measured based on a hierarchical system of those who refer to a particular article. If an individual, who is highly interconnected with other members of the scientific community by his/her previous research papers, makes a direct reference to your article, then some could interpret this as a sign indicating that your paper is more impactful than one cited by many less known/connected authors. Popularity is a much simpler concept. Many different ways to measure it tend to consider the number of citations per document. Therefore, the more people cite your research papers the better, regardless of how well-known or connected they are.

Impact metrics

Impact metrics/indexes/factors are not only there to report on how prestigious or popular an article is, but they are also considered when deciding whether or not to fund particular projects or hire researchers. This gives these numbers a more pragmatic (although problematic) value and therefore more reason for you to know about them. Many scholarly databases either report or offer the option to calculate some of these values. The following are 2 of the most popular metrics used to express the impact of research papers and their authors.

You should know that many other impact metrics do exist, like the I10 index, the field-weighted citation impact, citescore, document count, journal impact factor, scimago journal rank, etc.

H index

This index is the most popular metric for measuring the impact in the scientific community. It was originally proposed by Hirsh in 2005 as a way to assess the impact of articles in the field of physics. Nowadays, it is mostly used for research papers about physics, biomedicine, information science, and businesses.

The reason this index is so popular is that it represents the output and impact of a group of research papers in a single value. The way it works is very simple. The H index is equal to “h” when the number of your published articles is equal to the number of times each article has been cited. This means that if you publish frequently and most of your articles are cited many times, then your H index will be high. For example, if you published 5 articles and each article was cited at least 5 times, then your H index= 5.

The H index has plenty of advantages: Is taken into consideration when granting awards, useful to evaluate productivity, is considered superior to many other metrics (like “total number of citations”) and is easy to calculate and understand using public databases.

Its limitations include: Can’t be used to compare researchers from different fields; if you want to compare researchers at different points of their careers their H index should be divided by the number of years since their first publication; when research papers reach a certain amount of citations they stop having an effect over the index; can’t be used as an indicator of an author’s career; is sensitive to self-citation; for authors with very common names often leads to incorrect estimations; and each journal calculates a different H index value based on their local database.

Because of these limitations, authors can find themselves in one of the following 3 situations. 1) High index but low impact: When they are very productive but rarely mentioned or cite themselves often in every paper, 2) Low index but high impact: When they only publish very popular and relevant research papers occasionally and 3) Balance between index and impact: Their productivity and impact are proportional to each other.

Several other popular indexes are just modifications of the H index, the g index, and h^2are frequent examples.

Citation count

This metric is popular but many scientists also consider it as a “blunt instrument.” Citation count is simply the total number of times an article has been cited. It can also be used for authors and journals. It does have some advantages: Is great to determine who is using your work and why; allows to compare citations between authors as long as they are contemporaneous of the same field and from author at similar points of their careers; other metrics use citation count to compare authors and research papers from different fields; is easy to calculate and very direct.

Citation count also has plenty of limitations: Each journal and database calculates the final value based only on their local data; very prolific authors will see strong variability in their numbers; Integrating data from different journal becomes difficult because a single citation can be counted several times; and it is not a good method to compare authors because it only observes one aspect of their research.

How to write a high impact research paper?

Some young scientists are probably thought to write only about the facts and present them in a very dry way and chronological order. If you follow the traditional method to write a research paper, the end result will be adequate but probably also dull and not very appealing.

A research paper’s content should be constructed to draw interest. High impact research papers should be not only informative but also interesting. With that in mind, these are our recommendations based on the standards set by high impact journals.

Write your research paper enthusiastically: writing a research paper is something that should be done with a positive attitude.
Tell a story: what do you want to convey by publishing this paper? why is this paper important? those are the questions you need to answer. Plan ahead and structure your introduction, methods, results, and conclusions so they work together and communicate a single story. This will make your paper more appealing to readers.
Figures: Many deny it, but the truth is that when reading a research paper our eyes gravitate towards images more than the text. This is why you should consider not only the quality of your figures but also their aesthetics. Your figures should be easily understandable and visually alluring.
Your audience: As we’ve already discussed most impact metrics only take into consideration very limited academic sources, but you shouldn’t. You should aim for large audiences, this means that your paper should be understandable by not only experts in your field, but also by people not familiar with all that specialized terminologies. If possible, your article should be aimed even towards non-scientists, which will make it more accessible and easier to share.
Relevance: research topics don’t exist in a void. Always try to link your work to current topics. Contextualizing your paper will give it more relevance and place it inside a greater discussion.

SEO for research paper (Academic Search Engine Optimization)

ASEO is the practice in which academic documents are crafted or modified to facilitate their discovery and indexation by academic search engines (like google scholar, pubmed and many others). Your goal always should be for your paper to be among the first search results, that way the chances of more people reading it increases greatly.

The following is a series of facts based on current knowledge about the algorithm used by several academic search engines to find and organize their results.

Keywords are extremely important, they should be selected aiming for their relevance in the field and their low levels of competition (not very popular keywords). This is achieved by using academic search engines to screen for potential keywords.
The title should include 1 or 2 of your main keywords, the number of times they appear is not important, however, the final title should be as short as possible.
Keywords should be repeated organically all throughout the paper (title, abstract, body and conclusions). The abstract is particularly important.
Using keywords in your headings will result in a higher position in search results.
Be consistent when citing other authors, their names should always be written in the same way.
Make sure to include synonyms for each keyword. Academic search engines don’t automatically look for synonyms of the search terms and this will help you get noticed.
Research papers published in open access journals tend to have higher citation counts.
Many important search engines consider citation count to be important, therefore, the first search results will almost always have the highest numbers of citations, also in this case, self-citation does help.
If the name of the journal includes one of your keywords or is particularly relevant to the topic of your research, then your research paper will climb to a higher position.
The reputation or prestige of the author and/or publication is considered by academic search engines.
When possible, create links to your article in social media and encourage your colleagues to do the same.

Interestingly, the citation style doesn’t seem to be an important element for impact, for example, if everything else is the same, an APA research paper shouldn’t be any different from and MLA8 paper when it comes to impact.

Now you have the basic knowledge to be an effective research paper editor. Whether you decide to do it yourself or use a research paper editing service, you now understand how impact is defined in the scientific community. Writing a research paper with these tools should result in a high-impact research paper.

References

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Ravenscroft, J., Liakata, M., Clare, A., & Duma, D. (2017). Measuring scientific impact beyond academia: An assessment of existing impact metrics and proposed improvements. PLOS ONE, 12(3), e0173152. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0173152

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Wageningen university and research. (n.d.). How do I calculate my h-index?. Retrieved from https://www.wur.nl/en/article/How-do-I-calculate-my-h-index.htm

Arizona state university library. (2018, November 16). LibGuides: Citation Research and Impact Metrics: Citation Counts for Articles. Retrieved from https://libguides.asu.edu/citation/citationcountsarticles

Garner, R. M., Hirsch, J. A., Albuquerque, F. C., & Fargen, K. M. (2017). Bibliometric indices: defining academic productivity and citation rates of researchers, departments and journals. Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery, 10(2), 102-106. doi:10.1136/neurintsurg-2017-013265

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Buenz, E. J. (2019). Essential elements for high-impact scientific writing. Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-019-00546-7

Wiley. (n.d.). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your article. Retrieved from https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/Prepare/writing-for-seo.html

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