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Research evaluation is the process of judging the quality, influence, and output of scholarly work — and in practice it usually means turning citation data into a defensible story about your impact. On Harzing.com, that work is supported by the Publish or Perish software for citation analysis, the Journal Quality List, and blog guidance such as "Finding the pearls in your citation record," which shows how to present a citation record to its best advantage. This explainer covers what gets evaluated, which metrics are commonly used and where they mislead, how to collect and analyse citation data, and how the results feed into promotion, funding, and career decisions.

What "research evaluation" covers

Evaluation happens at several levels, and the metrics differ at each:

Harzing.com frames research evaluation alongside academic publishing, creating research impact, and research diffusion through social media — a reminder that citation counts are only one channel through which impact is expressed.

Metrics you will meet, and their limits

• Citation count — how often a work is cited. Simple, but strongly age- and field-dependent; a recent paper in a slow-citing field will look weak next to an older paper in a fast-citing one.
• h-index — the point where a researcher has h papers each cited at least h times. It rewards sustained output but penalises early-career researchers and those who publish fewer, longer works.
• Journal-level indicators — used as a proxy for quality. The Journal Quality List on Harzing.com exists precisely because journal standing varies by field and by list, so a single ranking is rarely decisive.
• Altmetrics and diffusion — social media sharing, policy references, and practitioner uptake. Harzing.com treats research diffusion as a distinct activity from citation accumulation.

The practical rule: never present a single number as the verdict. Present the number, the context that explains it, and the specific works that carry the impact.

Collecting and analysing citation data with Publish or Perish

Publish or Perish is the citation-analysis tool hosted on Harzing.com. The general workflow:

1. Define the input. Decide whose or which works you are evaluating — an author name, a set of publications, or a journal.
2. Run the query against the citation data source the tool queries.
3. Inspect the results, not just the summary. Check for name disambiguation problems: common names, name changes, and institutional variants all split or inflate a record.
4. Clean the record. Remove duplicates and works that are not yours before trusting any aggregate metric.
5. Read the metrics in context. Export or note the citation counts, h-index, and the distribution of citations across works.
6. Verify the expected result. The cleaned record should match your own publication list; if it does not, the discrepancy is the finding.

The most common failure point is step 3. A high h-index built on a merged record of two different researchers is worse than a modest, accurate one — it will not survive scrutiny in a promotion or funding review.

Turning a citation record into a case

Harzing.com's "Finding the pearls in your citation record" describes the task directly: find the pearls, polish them, and string them into a necklace that tells your citation story effectively. In practice that means:

• Identify your highest-impact works and explain why they were cited — a methods paper, a widely reused dataset, a framing concept.
• Group citations thematically rather than listing them chronologically, so a reviewer sees a coherent contribution.
• Name the outliers. A single highly cited paper among otherwise modest output is a story about a specific idea landing, not a statistical accident to hide.
• Pair citation evidence with non-citation evidence — invited talks, adoption in practice, teaching use — because evaluation committees increasingly ask for impact beyond the count.

Where evaluation results are used

Citation and quality evidence typically feeds into:

• Promotion and tenure applications — where a structured, verifiable record matters more than a headline number.
• Funding applications — where track record is one criterion among feasibility and fit.
• Journal and venue selection — where the Journal Quality List helps you judge where a paper is likely to be visible and credible.
• Career strategy — Harzing.com's career guides cover journal publishing, research diffusion, research impact, and promotion applications as connected activities, not separate chores.

If you are early in your career, the site points to its Working in academia page as the best starting point, since evaluation expectations differ sharply by career stage and country.

A workable default

Treat research evaluation as a documentation habit rather than a once-a-decade panic. Keep a clean, disambiguated publication record; run it through Publish or Perish periodically so you notice trends early; check journal standing against the Journal Quality List before submitting; and rehearse the two-sentence explanation of your most-cited work. That preparation is what makes an evaluation conversation about your research rather than about your spreadsheet.

The "resumé" on Harzing.com is Anne-Wil Harzing's own academic resumé — a personal career record hosted on her site, not a blank template or a job-application tool. If you are looking for a generic CV format, this is not it. If you want to see how an established academic presents her career, or you want the career resources that sit alongside it, the site is worth exploring. The resumé appears on the site's home page as one of its main sections, alongside her research programs and publications.

What the site actually contains

Harzing.com describes itself as the home of Anne-Wil's resumé, research programs, and publications, including her academic career guides and white papers. It also hosts several standalone resources:

• CYGNA Women in Academia pages
• The Journal Quality List
• Publish or Perish, software for citation analysis

The site's blog covers academic publishing, creating research impact, doing (international) research, academic etiquette, the Publish or Perish software, academic careers, gender in academia, and Positive Academia.

So the resumé is one entry point into a broader set of materials aimed at academics managing their careers and their publishing record.

Where to start if you are early career

The site states directly that if you are an early career academic, your best starting point is the Working in academia page. That page is described as a container page for all the site's resources related to working in academia: books, blog posts, videos, software, and more.

This matters because the site is not organized as a single linear course. The Working in academia page functions as an index, so you can find the format you want — a blog post, a video, or a book — rather than reading everything in sequence.

The career guides and white papers

The site hosts a book series titled Crafting your career in academia, described as career guides for various aspects of an academic career:

• journal publishing
• research diffusion through social media
• research impact
• promotion applications

Alongside these, the site publishes white papers. One example referenced on the home page is a white paper on the art of academic writing, which offers five perspectives: writing as sculpting, writing as drawing, writing as painting, writing as music, and writing as acting.

Tools and communities hosted on the site

These are separate from the resumé and the career guides, but they sit in the same place, which is useful if you are working on a promotion case or trying to present your citation record.

Blog posts that show how the resources are used

The featured posts on the home page illustrate the kind of practical material the site carries:

• "My academic career: a story in four seasons, eight failures, and four morals" — tells the story of the eight most significant failures in the author's academic career and outlines how each had unexpected upsides.
• "You finally made it to full professor, now what?" — on crafting an academic identity and sustaining it in retirement.
• "Your first publication – A roller-coaster ride with lots of ups and downs" — walks step by step through the emotional journey of getting a first publication published, and explains why rejections are often the norm rather than the exception.
• "Finding the pearls in your citation record" — shows how to use Publish or Perish to present an academic citation record to its best advantage: find the pearls, polish them, and string them into a necklace that presents your citation story effectively.

That last post is the clearest link between the site's tools and its career advice: the software is not presented as an end in itself, but as a way to build a case.

What to keep in mind

The resumé is a personal document, so treat it as an example of how one academic structures a career narrative rather than a form to fill in. The site's legal notice states that you may link to the website but should not copy content except for personal use, and that unless otherwise noted the site and its contents are © Anne-Wil Harzing 1997–2026. If you plan to reuse anything, check that notice first.

If your goal is to understand what academic publishing involves before you start, the site's publishing-related blog posts and the journal publishing career guide are the most directly relevant pieces. If your goal is to present your own record, start with the citation-record post and the Publish or Perish software it describes.

Academic publishing is the process of submitting your research to a journal (or book publisher), having it reviewed by peers, and—if accepted—seeing it appear as a citable publication. It matters because publications are the main currency of an academic career: they establish your track record, support promotion and funding applications, and let your work reach other researchers. If you are an early career academic, the practical starting point is to treat publishing as a multi-stage process with a high rejection rate built in, and to learn both the mechanics and the emotional side before you submit your first paper.

What academic publishing actually involves

At its core, academic publishing is a quality-control and dissemination system. You produce a manuscript, a journal assesses it (usually through peer review), and the accepted version becomes part of the permanent scholarly record. The published paper is then something others can cite, which is how research impact accumulates over time.

For an individual academic, this means publishing serves several connected purposes:

• Building a track record — a visible record of peer-reviewed output that others can evaluate.
• Creating research impact — work that is read, used, and cited by others.
• Supporting career progression — publications feed into promotion applications and research evaluation.
• Joining a scholarly conversation — situating your work within an existing body of research.

Anne-Wil Harzing's site frames this broadly: it hosts academic career guides and white papers alongside resources on research impact, research diffusion, and promotion applications, and its blog covers academic publishing, creating research impact, doing (international) research, and academic etiquette. That range is a useful signal that publishing is not a single skill but a cluster of them.

The main stages, from submission to acceptance

The exact workflow varies by field and journal, but the typical sequence looks like this:

1. Choose a target venue. Match your paper's topic, scope, and level to a journal. The Journal Quality List hosted on Harzing.com is one resource for comparing journals.
2. Prepare and format the manuscript. Follow the journal's author guidelines precisely; formatting errors are an avoidable reason for desk rejection.
3. Submit. The paper enters editorial screening, where an editor decides whether to send it out for review.
4. Peer review. Reviewers assess originality, method, and contribution, and recommend accept, revise, or reject.
5. Revise and resubmit. Most accepted papers go through at least one round of revision. Respond to reviewers point by point.
6. Acceptance and production. The paper is copy-edited, typeset, and published; you may review proofs.
7. Publication and beyond. The paper becomes citable, and you can work on making it visible and tracking its citations.

Each stage is a gate. A paper can exit the process at screening or after review, and that is normal rather than exceptional.

Why rejection is common—and how to handle it

One of the most useful things to internalize early is that rejection is the norm, not the exception. Harzing's blog post Your first publication – A roller-coaster ride with lots of ups and downs walks step by step through the emotional journey of getting a first publication published and explains why rejections are often the norm rather than the exception.

Practically, that means:

• Expect multiple submissions. A paper that is rejected by one journal is usually not a failed paper; it is a paper aimed at the wrong venue or needing revision.
• Separate the decision from your worth. Reviewers judge a manuscript, not your potential as a researcher.
• Mine the reviews. Even a rejection often contains specific, actionable feedback you can use in the next submission.
• Keep moving. Revise and resubmit rather than shelving the paper.

Harzing's own account of her career—My academic career: a story in four seasons, eight failures, and four morals—describes eight significant failures and how each had unexpected upsides. The lesson for early career researchers is that setbacks in publishing are a normal part of a long career, not a signal to stop.

Presenting your publication and citation record

Once you have publications, how you present them matters for promotion, funding, and job applications. Citation counts and metrics are easy to misread, so the goal is to tell an accurate, well-framed story rather than to dump raw numbers.

Harzing's post Finding the pearls in your citation record shows how to use the Publish or Perish software to present your citation record to its best advantage: find the pearls in your record, polish them, and string them into a "beautiful necklace" that presents your citation story effectively. The underlying method is worth copying even if you use different tools:

• Identify your strongest, most-cited, or most relevant outputs.
• Check that citation data is accurate and attributed correctly.
• Group and frame them so a reader can see the shape of your contribution.
• Present the narrative, not just the metric.

Publish or Perish is the citation-analysis software hosted on the site, so it is a concrete tool you can use for this step.

Where early career academics should start

If you are new to publishing, the site points to a clear entry route: the Working in academia page is described as the best starting point for early career academics. It acts as a container page for all the site's resources related to working in academia—books, blog posts, videos, software, and more.

From there, the most relevant resources for publishing specifically are:

The Crafting your career in academia series is explicitly described as career guides for various aspects of an academic career, including journal publishing—so it is the most direct match if your question is "how do I publish."

A realistic way to get started

If you are about to publish for the first time, a workable plan is:

1. Read the Working in academia page to orient yourself across the resources.
2. Work through the journal publishing guide in the Crafting your career in academia series.
3. Use the Journal Quality List to shortlist target journals.
4. Submit, and treat the first decision—whatever it is—as data rather than a verdict.
5. When you have outputs, use Publish or Perish to build a clear citation narrative.

The through-line in all of this is that academic publishing rewards persistence and framing as much as it rewards the underlying research. The resources above are built around that reality, and they are aimed specifically at people at the start of an academic career.

Publish or Perish is a citation-analysis software program hosted on Harzing.com, created by Anne-Wil Harzing. It retrieves and analyzes academic citation data to help you measure research impact and present your citation record. It is most useful for early career academics, researchers preparing promotion or funding applications, and anyone who needs to demonstrate the reach of their published work beyond a single database's numbers.

What the software does

Publish or Perish is described on Harzing.com as software for citation analysis. Its core function is to pull citation data and turn it into a set of impact metrics you can interpret and present.

According to the site, it is one of the resources hosted alongside Anne-Wil Harzing's academic career guides, white papers, the Journal Quality List, and the CYGNA Women in Academia pages. The Harzing.com blog also covers the software directly, which means guidance on using it sits alongside broader material on academic publishing, research impact, and academic careers.

How citation analysis works in practice

The general workflow for a tool like this is:

1. Choose your data source. Citation-analysis software queries external sources to find who has cited your work. The specific sources available depend on the version and configuration of the software.
2. Enter your search parameters. You typically search by author name, publication title, or a set of works.
3. Review the retrieved records. The software returns matching publications and their citation counts.
4. Read the computed metrics. The software calculates summary statistics from the citation data it retrieves.
5. Export or present the results. You can use the output to build a citation narrative for applications, reviews, or your own assessment.

The expected result is a structured picture of your citation record rather than a raw list of numbers.

Core metrics you will encounter

Citation-analysis tools commonly report a standard set of indicators. The table below summarizes what each one tells you.

The h-index and g-index are the two most commonly cited summary measures. The h-index rises slowly and can understate the contribution of a few very highly cited papers; the g-index is designed to give those papers more credit. Reading both together gives a fuller picture than either alone.

Finding the pearls in your citation record

Harzing.com features a blog post titled "Finding the pearls in your citation record," which describes using Publish or Perish to present your academic citation record to its best advantage. The approach it outlines is to find the pearls in your record, polish them, and string them into a "beautiful necklace" that presents your citation story effectively.

In practical terms, that means:

• Identify your standout outputs. Look for the papers with the highest citation counts or the steepest citation growth.
• Contextualize them. A single highly cited paper can carry a record; explain its significance rather than listing it flatly.
• Build a narrative. Group and order your evidence so it tells a coherent story about your research trajectory, not just a ranked list.

This matters because raw metrics rarely speak for themselves in promotion, hiring, or funding contexts. A curated citation story is more persuasive than an exported table.

Common cautions and limitations

• Data sources differ. Different citation databases index different journals, languages, and document types. Counts from one source will not match another, so avoid mixing sources within a single comparison.
• Coverage is uneven. Fields with strong preprint cultures, non-English publishing, or book-based outputs may be under- or over-represented depending on the source queried.
• Metrics are not quality judgments. A high citation count reflects attention, not necessarily importance or correctness. Use metrics alongside qualitative evidence.
• Self-citations and duplicates. Retrieved records may include self-citations or duplicate entries; check before presenting figures.
• Version and configuration matter. Available features and data sources can change between versions, so confirm what your installation supports before relying on a specific metric.

Where to start on Harzing.com

If you are new to academic life, Harzing.com points early career academics to its "Working in academia" page as the best starting point. That page acts as a container for the site's books, blog posts, videos, and software related to academic careers. From there you can reach the Publish or Perish software, the Journal Quality List, and the blog's coverage of citation analysis and research impact.

For the specific task of presenting your citation record, the "Finding the pearls in your citation record" post is the most directly relevant resource on the site.

Gender in academia refers to the ways gender shapes who enters academic careers, whose work gets published and cited, and who reaches senior positions. Harzing.com treats it as a standing topic: the site hosts the CYGNA Women in Academia pages and runs blog posts on gender in academia alongside its material on academic publishing, research impact, and research evaluation. If you are an early career academic trying to understand why career outcomes differ by gender — and what you can do about it — the site's Working in academia page is the recommended starting point.

Why gender matters for career outcomes

Academic careers are built on a chain of evaluations: getting into a doctoral programme, publishing, winning grants, being hired, and being promoted. Gender can influence each link, sometimes through explicit barriers and sometimes through patterns that are hard to see from inside a single career.

The practical consequence is that two researchers with similar records may not face the same odds. Recognising this is the first step toward interpreting your own situation accurately rather than attributing every setback to personal failure.

Where gender-related challenges show up

Academic publishing

Publishing is the gatekeeping step that feeds everything downstream. Gender-related issues here include who gets invited to review, who appears on editorial boards, and how authorship is credited in collaborative work. Because publication records drive hiring and promotion, small imbalances at this stage compound over a career.

Hiring and promotion

Evaluation committees weigh not just output but perceived fit, leadership potential, and "collegiality." These are exactly the criteria where unexamined assumptions can enter. The result is that the same behaviour — assertiveness, say — can be read differently depending on who displays it.

Citation metrics and research evaluation

Citation counts are often treated as neutral measures of quality. They are not. Who cites whom reflects visibility, network access, and self-citation patterns, all of which can carry a gender dimension. This matters because research evaluation systems increasingly lean on citation data to make funding and promotion decisions.

Harzing.com's Publish or Perish software is designed for citation analysis, and the site's guidance on finding the pearls in your citation record shows how to present that record deliberately rather than letting a raw number speak for you. For anyone whose citation profile understates their contribution, that is a concrete countermeasure.

Resources on Harzing.com

The blog also covers academic publishing, creating research impact, doing international research, academic etiquette, academic careers, and Positive Academia — all of which intersect with gender without being limited to it.

Practical steps for early career academics

1. Learn how evaluation actually works. Read up on research evaluation and citation analysis before you need them for a promotion case. Understanding the machinery lets you work with it instead of being surprised by it.
2. Build a citation narrative, not just a citation count. Use citation analysis to identify your strongest work and present it as a coherent story. The site's "finding the pearls" approach is a template for this.
3. Use the career guides as a checklist. The book series covers journal publishing, research diffusion, research impact, and promotion applications — the four areas where preparation most often decides outcomes.
4. Connect with networks. The CYGNA pages exist precisely because shared experience is useful; the site also notes that failure stories (see "My academic career: a story in four seasons, eight failures, and four morals") often carry unexpected upsides.
5. Start from the right entry point. If you are early career, the site recommends the Working in academia page as your best starting point rather than browsing individual posts at random.

What to keep in mind

Gender in academia is not a single problem with a single fix. It operates through publishing, hiring, promotion, and metrics at once, which is why the useful responses are also multiple: understand the evaluation systems, present your record deliberately, and use the resources and networks built for exactly this purpose. Harzing.com's combination of the CYGNA pages, gender-focused blog posts, and practical career guides gives you a place to start on all three fronts.