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Scholarly Communication Resources

Bibliometrics, including traditional and emerging metrics, are used to evaluate the relative importance of a publication or researcher to a subject area.

 

Tracking and using research impact data may be used by faculty to:

  • Support applications for promotion, funding, and grants
  • Identify collaborators for future research 
  • Improve visibility by correcting and merging different automated profiles
  • Understanding and driving alternative metrics through social media platforms

 

Using citation metrics to measure the influence or impact of a researcher or publication has certain limitations and the following should be considered:

  • Most measurement tools favor certain types of publications, and subject areas. For example, working in a smaller field, publishing in a language other than English, and/or publishing mainly in books, may generate fewer citations.
  • Others considerations in evaluating a researcher's impact, include, length of career, skewed results through self-citing, and publishing review articles. 
  • The need for the appropriate use of metrics has been addressed by research and professional bodies:
  • IEEE Statement on Appropriate use of Bibliometric Indicators
  • Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics

 

Author Metrics

H-Index

h-index = number of papers (h) with a citation number ≥ h

  • Measures author impact in relation to output

    • An author with an H-Index of 20, has 20 published papers cited at least 20 times 

    • This index should only be used to compare authors publishing in the same venues, subject area, and same period of their careers.

  • An h-index is specific to a citation database, and what is indexed by that platform. An author will have different h-index rankings on different citation databases.
i10-index

i10-Index = the number of publications with at least 10 citations

  • A Google Scholar metric that measures influence and productivity of author and as indexed by the Google Scholar platform
  • Only used by Google, less selective, and covers broader range of materials and subject areas than Scopus and Web of Science

Article Metrics

Citation Count
  • The number of citations received is the simplest metric collected and available on different citation databases (Scopus and Web of Science), including Google Scholar, and academic search engines
 
Highly Influential Citations
  • Semantic Scholar - an academic search engine, breaks down the total citations a paper receives further, and establishes the impact of a paper by the number of "highly influential citations", and as opposed to background citations, methods citations, and results citations
 
Alternative Metrics

Alternative metrics (and as opposed to conventional bibliometric citation counts) assess influence of an article or publication based on online and social media engagement.  Popular examples include:

 Altmetric Attention Score and Donut - identifies how much and what type of attention a research output has received. Each color represents a type of engagement which can be explored and includes online media and social media forums.

  • Tool can be found on publisher article metrics pages and on academic search engines - Dimensions

PlumX Metrics -  this index includes traditional citation count and usage on the particular platform utilizing this tool. The five categories are Citations, Usage (downloads), Captures (saved to a list or to a reference manager), Mentions (online forums), and Social media.

Journal Metrics

Journal impact tools measure the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period.  There are a number of services that provide journal metrics and all employ various algorithms to arrive at a ranking of impact.

Traditional citation databases provide journal impact data:

  • Journal Citation Reports (JCR), part of Web of Science - from Clarivate Analytics.
    • Provides impact factors and rankings of curated journals in the all the sciences, humanities and social sciences.
    • Traditionally considered an authoritative resource for impact factor data. 
    • Metrics include, total cites, total articles, and immediacy index,  five-year impact factor and visualized trend data. 
  • Journal impact data from Scopus - from Elsevier
    • Largest curated collection of scholarly resources across all disciplines
    • Metrics include CiteScore metrics, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 
  • Google Scholar Metrics 
    • Metrics includes top 100 publications in 9 different languages, or by broad subject research areas and different subcategories.
    • Draws data from articles published between 2009 and 2013 and citation from all articles indexed in Google Scholar. 
  • Top Computer Science Journals Ranked by Research.com
    • Ranks top journals in Computer Science and related disciplines using a combination of traditional citation metrics (Impact Factor from Web of Science, and CiteScore form Scopus) and top scientist endorsement using Research.com's G2R Score.
    • Read more on the methodology of this ranking system: Our methodology | Research.com

Conferences

The ranking is based on an analysis of over 1000 conference profiles and websites and evaluates h-index of contributing scientists and Research.com's Impact Score, and over a defined period of time.

Improve Impact

There are a number of tools and resources available to help manage and improve visibility of your research

  • Register, correct, discover, and manage your profile on different platforms - see the Manage your researcher profile guide for more information on this.
  •  Use researcher and discipline specific networks and repositories to share your work.
  • Negotiate greater rights retention with publishers and/or select open access venues to allow you to self-archive your research on different platforms and forums.
  • Promote and increase engagement for your your work on social media platforms .
  • Deposit different parts of your research output in relevant repositories, including data and software code  
  • Protect all your work, use public copyright licenses (for example, Creative Commons).