Your Research Identity and Impact: Research Metrics

Metrics, also known as research metrics or bibliometrics, is a measurement of scholarly research using quantitative methods such as citation counts, downloads, mentions, and more. Metrics are also used to demonstrate the impact of research publications at the journal, article, and author levels, which help faculty and researchers show the reach of their scholarship for tenure and promotion, job opportunities, and grant funding, among other things.

Altmetrics is used to refer to "alternative metrics" and are generally article-level metrics. Altmetrics attempts to fill a gap in more traditional metrics by using a more comprehensive range of sources, such as social media, news outlets, blog posts, and citation managers, in addition to citation and download counts to determine the impact (or "attention") of scholarship.

Depending on the type of scholarship or creative work you have produced and depending on your research field, there are several options available for you. Any metric should be used with the understanding that it may not create an entirely accurate picture of the impact of your scholarship. Many metrics, for example, don't differentiate between positive and negative attention.

Text from this section is used under CCBY4.0 from The Metrics Toolkit.

The top databases that provide resources for calculating journal impact:

Journal Citation Reports. Allows evaluation and comparison of journals using citation data drawn from over 7,000 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 60 countries. Includes science, technology, and social sciences publications..

Google Scholar Metrics. A free resource from Google. Find the h5-index for journals in your discipline.

Journal Insights. Elsevier's Journal Insights allows you to identify journal acceptance rates for some Elsevier journals.

SCImago Journal and Country Rank. A free source that uses data from Elsevier's Scopus database. Includes a "compare" feature that compares journal citation among countries. There is also a "map generator" that shows citation relationships by country.

The top databases that provide resources for calculating citations to an author's works:

Web of Science. Content coverage for this database is focused on the sciences, medicine, and social sciences. Allows users to export a plain text or tab-delimited file or utilize the API, to obtain citation data. Data is limited to 100,000 records per query. Institutional login required.

Dimensions. This database's content coverage is focused primarily on the sciences, medicine, business, and social sciences. Allows users to perform powerful and complex queries with their API or export a CSV or Excel file. Queries are limited to the first 50,000 records with either method. Free to access, but account creation is recommended.

Google Scholar. Content coverage for this search engine is multidisciplinary. Users can perform simple or more complex queries, but currently, no export method is available. There is no publicly available or subscription-based API. Free to access.

The top databases that provide resources for calculating an author's h-Index include:

Web of Science. To find an author’s h-Index: Firsr perform an Author search in Web of Science. You will generate a list of titles published by the author. To locate the author's h-Index, go to upper right hand corner of records retrieved. Find the Create Citation Report and click on it. This will take you to the Citation Report. The second box to the left is the h-Index for the individual author. 

Google Scholar. It calculates the H-Index and its variant, the i10-Index for Authors. I10-Index is the number of articles with at least 10 citations. 

Metrics Toolkit. Helps you Navigate the Research Metrics Landscape. It is a web resource for researchers and evaluators by providing guidance for demonstrating and evaluating research impact. It includes a section on the h-Index

ImpactStory. An open source website that helps researchers explore and share the impact of their research, using alternative metrics.