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Library - Researcher Visibility and Impact: Tracking your citations

Tracking Research Impact

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Bibliometrics

BIBLIOMETRICS offers a set of methods and measures that can be used to assess research impact and patterns in scholarly communication. In essence, it measures the PRODUCTIVITY and IMPACT of the published work. 

Main uses: Ranking and benchmark data, assessment of individual researchers and journal rankings.

 

What Impact can be Measured with Bibliometric Data

  • Article/Book Citation Impact: The academic impact of particular works, such as journal articles, conference proceedings, and books, can be measured by the number of times they are cited by other works
  • Journal Citation Impact: The impact of particular academic journals can be measured by the number of times their articles are cited and where they are cited.
  • Researcher Citation impact: The number of works a researcher has published and the number of times these works have been cited can be an indicator of the academic impact of an individual researcher

Sources for Tracking Citations

 

 

 

Key Research Metrics

Metric level

Metric

Definition

Author Level Metrics

Publication Count per Author

Total number of publications by an author during a time frame.

Citation Count per Author

Total number of citations an author has received for all their work over a specific timeframe.

Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) per Author

Ratio of citations received by an author relative to the expected world average for the subject field, publication type, and year.

h-Index

The number of papers (h) that have been cited at least h times.
Example: An h-index of 20 means 20 papers have each been cited 20 times or more.

Article Level Metrics

Citation Count per Article

Number of citations a publication receives during a specific time window.

Field Weighted Citation Impact per Article

Ratio of actual citations to expected citations for an output of similar type, field, and age. FWCI=1 means world average; FWCI>1 indicates above-average citations.

Article Ranking in Topic

Articles sorted by topic and citation count; allows identification of top-performing papers in a specific topic.

Journal Level Metrics

Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

The average number of citations in a year for all articles and reviews published in a journal over the past three years.

JCR (Journal Citation Reports):

A yearly report that provides journal metrics like Impact Factor and quartiles (Q1–Q4) to help assess journal influence.

SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)

Measures a journal’s citation impact relative to the citation practices of its field. It adjusts for differences in how often papers are typically cited in different disciplines, so you can compare journals across fields.

CiteScore

Measures the average citations per document for a journal over a set period (usually four years). It reflects the overall citation impact of the journal’s content, not individual papers.

Altmetrics

Altmetrics are measures that capture the attention a resource generates on the social web or other sources. This attention could be positive or negative. They can be applied to journal articles, books/book chapters, software, datasets, websites, videos, etc. Altmetrics attempt to show the influence and engagement of work through blogs, reference management systems, scholarly social networks, and other platforms. They are metrics that complement traditional metrics, such as citation counts, to capture the impact within the scholarly community and beyond.

Measures of impact based on online activity, which are mined or gathered from online tools and social media. For example:

  • Tweets, mentions, shares or links,
  • Downloads, clicks or views,
  • Saves, bookmarks, favourites, likes or upvotes,
  • Reviews, comments, ratings, or recommendations, 
  • Adaptations or derivative works, and                              

Altmetric providers and tools

  • Altmetric Bookmarklet for Researchers

    This free bookmarklet can be used by individual researchers to see how much attention an article got online.

  • Several academic databases and platforms incorporate Altmetric badges to display article-level attention data. Notable examples include IEEE Xplore, ProQuest, and platforms like Oxford University Press online books. Additionally, many journal publishers like Elsevier, Nature, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley include Altmetric data on their platforms.