LibGuides: Researcher Support: Citation Impact

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Citation Impact

Citation is the process of acknowledging or citing the author and title of a source (journal, book, or other) used in a published work. Such citations can be counted as measures of the usage and impact of the cited work. Measures derived from citation analysis include citation counts for:

an individual article (how often it was cited)
an author (total citations, or average citation count per article)
a journal (average citation count for the articles in the journal)

When using citation metrics there are several important things to remember:

Citations are database specific, so smaller databases will likely have fewer citations.
Citations accrue over time.
Citation patterns vary across disciplines.
Citations are just one way of demonstrating research impact.
It is harder to track book citations.

Article-level metrics

Citation metrics for articles revolve mostly around citation counts. Citation counts simply count up the number of times your article, book or other research output have been cited. Citation counts may vary across databases, such as Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, and Google Scholar, as each database indexes different journals. Google Scholar citations are likely to be over-inflated as they may count multiple versions of the same paper.

When using article-level citation metrics there are several things important to remember:

Citations accrue over time, so older research will have more citations.
Citation patterns vary across disciplines.
Not all citations are positive - controversial research is also likely to receive many citations. Try using scite.ai to understand the context of a citation.
Sometimes it's more important to note who cited rather than how many cited.

1. Go to Scopus.

2. Search for the article of interest by author, document type, or keywords.

3. From the results page, click on the article of interest. The number of citations appear in the Metrics panel on the right. You will also find the article's Field-Weighted Citation Impact here. The FWCI shows how well this document is cited when compared to similar documents. A value greater than 1.00 means the document is cited more than expected. You will also see some alternative metrics information, go to our page on Alternative Metrics to learn more.

4. Note that you can change the timeframe for these metrics and export this data by clicking on "View all metrics" at the top of the Metrics panel.

1. Go to Google Scholar.

2. Search for the article of interest using author, document title, or keywords.

3. From the results page, find the article of interest. The number of citations appears under the document title and abstract.

4. Click on the "Cited by" link to see who cited the article.

Author-level metrics

Author-level metrics measure the citation impact of the scholarly output of a single researcher. Author-level metrics are designed to help researchers assess the cumulative impact of their work, rather than the impact of a single publication. All author-level metrics are derived from article-level metrics: they aggregate or summarize the impact of an author's publications.

By far, the most common author-level citation metric is the h-index. Since it was proposed by JE Hirsch in 2005 it has gained a lot of popularity amongst researchers while bibliometrics scholars proposed a few variants to account for its weaknesses (g-index, m-index are good examples).

When using author-level citation metrics there are several important things to remember:

As a general rule of thumb, if an academic shows good citation metrics, it is very likely that he or she has made a significant impact on the field but,
There are good reasons why citations do not always equal high impact, such as; working in a niche field, publishing in a language other than English, or publishing mainly in books. All of these will effectively restrict the citation field.

1. Go to Scopus Author search.

2. Search for the author of interest.

3. From the results page, click on the author of interest. Here you will see basic information on the author as well a number of metrics related to the author such as; number of documents, total citations, and h-index.

4. Click on 'Analyze author output' for more information, such as breakdowns by subject area, document type, publication source, year, and co-authors.

5. Note that not all authors have an expandable profile. Authors with only one publication will not have the full profile as seen above. However, you can always see an author's h-index from the search results page.

1. Go to Google Scholar profile search.

2. Search for the author of interest.

3. From the results page, find the author of interest. You will see citation metrics for the author on the right such as total citations, h-index, and i10-index. Some authors also have how many documents are open access. For total number of documents, you have to continuously scroll towards the bottom of the author profile to see the document number at the bottom.

4. Note that for an author to have a Google Scholar profile, they must have created one.

Tools for Citation Analysis

Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
[Abstract-only] Scopus is an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: journals, books and conference proceedings. Delivering a comprehensive overview of the world's research output in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities, Scopus features smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research.

Harzing's Publish or Perish
A free program that retrieves citation data from Google Scholar and provides a summary of metrics.
SciVal
SciVal enables you to visualize research performance, benchmark relative to peers, develop collaborative partnerships and analyze research trends.

Databases Providing Citation Alerts

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR is an online archive of core scholarly journals and books in a wide variety of disciplines. It provides full text articles in back issues of journals from the earliest issues to within a few years of current publication, as well as book chapters. Please note that the current volume of a journal is NOT available on JSTOR; the latest volume available on JSTOR is usually 3-5 years old.

Scopus

Researcher Support