Research Impact Calculator

Overview

The Research Impact Calculator is a Python tool that quantifies the true influence of a research article by measuring how many lead authors have been influenced by it. This approach provides an alternative to traditional citation-based metrics, focusing on the reach of a publication rather than raw citation counts. The method is based on the research presented in the paper:

A. M. Aragón. “A measure for the impact of research.” Sci Rep 3 (2013), p. 1649.

Features

• Computes the impact of a manuscript based on the number of unique first authors citing it.
• Extends the measure to quantify the impact of individual researchers and institutions.
• Retrieves citation data using pybliometrics from the Scopus database.
• Provides an alternative to traditional metrics such as the h-index.

Installation

Prerequisites

Ensure you have Python 3.6+ installed. This package requires:

• pybliometrics
• requests

You can install the package directly using pip:

pip install research-impact

Alternatively, if you're working from the source:

pip install .

Usage

Once installed, the tool can be run from the command line:

$ impact <SCOPUS ID>

Or used within a Python script:

from research-impact.impact import impact
impact(<SCOPUS ID>)

How It Works

The script retrieves citation data from Scopus, for which you need to obtain an API key from the Elsevier Developer Portal. To successfully run the script your institution needs to have a subscription to Scopus. Having an active subscription ensures that you have the required access and permissions to utilize Scopus's data and features. Then you can run the code when logged into your institution network. When working remotely, you will also need to set up an insttoken to pair with your API key (for which you would be required to provide the email address with the domain from your subscribing institution).

The script retrieves the author's information and all citing papers, filtering out co-authored papers. Then it counts the number of unique first authors citing the scientist. The measure can be aggregated for individual researchers or institutions.

Example

For an author with multiple publications:

$ impact 22939868800

This will return:

-- Processing results for Search 'AU-ID(22939868800)' yielded 1 author as of 2024-10-09:
    Aragón, Alejandro M.; AUTHOR_ID:22939868800 (54 document(s))

-- Impact summary for Aragón Alejandro M. from a total of 54 articles:

year          selfies       excl-refs     impact        cumulative    
2008          1             0             1             1             
2009          0             1             3             4             
2010          3             2             6             10            
2011          1             3             11            21            
2012          1             6             14            35            
2013          2             15            19            54            
2014          2             6             24            78            
2015          1             20            26            104           
2016          1             13            34            138           
2017          1             7             21            159           
2018          1             7             27            186           
2019          2             14            38            224           
2020          2             23            40            264           
2021          3             16            70            334           
2022          5             8             58            392           
2023          3             19            88            480           
2024          3             17            150           630           
2025          3             1             28            658           
______________________________________________________________________
              35            178           658           658           
Period: 18 years
Impact per year: 36.56
Impact:  658

Author

Developed by Dr. Alejandro M. Aragón

For more information visit: aaragon.science.

License

This project is released under the MIT License.

Copyright © 2025 Alejandro M. Aragón. All rights reserved.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.