Bibliometrics is the quantitative analysis of scholarly publications, such as books and articles. Citation analysis is a commonly used bibliometric method. It measures the research impact or influence of an individual researcher, or research group. It should be noted that citation patterns vary from discipline to discipline and therefore metrics may not be the only measure to be used to assess impact.
Author impact can be measured in a number of different ways:
- the number of publications written by the author
- the number of citations to each of the author's publications
- the author's H-Index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of researcher. It is based on the set of the researcher's most cited papers and the number of citations that these papers have received in other publications
This data can be sources from the following citation databases and from Google Scholar:
Locate the article then select the Times cited or Cited by link. Please note the citation rate may vary in each tool due variations in coverage.
No citation tool will provide a complete citation count. Variations occur because citation tools have different source materials, date ranges and sometimes erroneous records.
See below an example of distribution of citations of a book in Bar-Ilan, J. (2010) Citations to the “Introduction to informetrics” indexed by WOS, Scopus and Google Scholar. Scientometrics, 82(3), p.504.
Note also that citation counts are not comparable across disciplines. For example, citation counts in Social Sciences and Humanities are lower because researchers are more often publishing in books and conference papers that are not well covered by citation databases.
An article's impact can be measured by the number of times it has been cited. Citation counts for articles can be identified by using the Scopus and Web of Science citation indexes, and other tools as below:
Alternative or Societal Impact - this will include other impacts of a work, such as the number of downloads, or mentions in social media:
Publish strategically! The following tools will help you discover the ranking of journals in different fields. They will help researchers - Higher Degree Research Students and Early Career Researchers in particular - discover which journals to publish in.