What can we learn from citation metrics? Measuring nurse researchers in Australia and New Zealand

Nurse researchers are under increasing scrutiny related to measures regarding performance, productivity, quality and excellence. In addition to internationally recognized citation metrics such as the Hirsh Index^©, within many countries various metrics and measures are in place and these are used to judge and rank the performance of researchers through research assessment activities (Haigh et al., 2015). Although some of these measures are relatively new, they have quickly gained prominence (McKenna et al., 2012). Australia has the Excellence in Research Australia (ERA), New Zealand (NZ) has the Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF), and the United Kingdom (UK) has the Research Excellence Framework with similar research assessment activities occurring in other parts of the world (Haigh et al., 2015). These measurement exercises were originally established to measure factors such as the quality and impact of scientific research (Hicks et al., 2015), and to foster and support excellence in research. However, they have come to have far greater bearing than their original aim. In some instances, metrics influence promotion, funding and perceived research impact as research evaluation and assessment exercises draw on metrics to judge and sometimes rank the performance of researchers, including nurse researchers. Today's generation of nurse researchers is the first generation that has had success (or otherwise) measured by such metrics. Previous generations of nurse researchers have had much simpler and somewhat cruder measures as evidence of impact, such as numbers of publications rather than the number of citations and standing and rank of journal.