Citation metrics focus on article citations as the gold standard for measuring the impact of research. Used to evaluate individual researchers, departments/centres, institutions, disciplines, countries and other modes.

Challenges: vulnerability to “gaming”; failure to adequately capture differences between disciplines and journals, tendency to privilege pure versus practical research.

Citation metrics sources:

• Google Scholar Citations

  Track citations to your articles, see who is citing them, graph citations over time, and more.

• H-index

  H index is an author-level metric calculated by number (h) of author’s articles which have been cited at least that same number (h) of times. Available from Google Scholar.
  Other h metrics include:
  H-core – set of top cited h articles from a journal
  H-median – median of citation counts in a journal’s h-core
  h5-index, h5-core, h5-median – publication metrics for a journal’s articles published in the past five years

• Impact Factor

  A journal’s Impact Factor is the number of citations in a given year to documents published in the 2 previous years, divided by the total number of documents published.
  Proprietary designation controlled by Clarivate Analytics and only applicable to publications included in Journal Citation Reports. Available via Web of Science.

• SCImago Journal Rank

  Similar to Google PageRank, SJR ranks journals by their average prestige per article. SJR calculations include both citations and journal prestige.
  Freely available; based on information from the Scopus database. Developed by a research group from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), University of Granada, Extremadura, Carlos III (Madrid) and Alcalá de Henares.

• Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)

  Measures average citation impact of a journal’s publication and corrects for differences in citation practices between different disciplines.
  Based on data from Scopus. Produced by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University.

• Eigenfactor Score

  Measures frequency that articles from a journal have been cited in a given year. Weighed by size; larger journals have higher scores. Developed at the University of Washington.

• CiteScore

  CiteScore metrics calculate the citations from all documents in year one to all documents published in the prior three years for a title.
  Developed by Elsevier. Based on data from Scopus.

These emerging – alternative – metrics include impact measures such as media coverage and social media sharing and mentions.  Can be used by individual researchers, departments, institutions, publications and more. For an overview of altmetrics, advice, usage examples and more consult the Altmetrics Guide created by the University of Waterloo

Challenges: As with citation metrics, altmetrics may fail to capture a full range of scholarship by omitting non-article outputs such as preprints, posters, data sets, conference proceedings, etc.

Popular Altmetrics tools:

• Altmetric

  Tracks myriad sources for mentions of research outputs to calculate an Altmetric score. Sources tracked include news media, social media, citations, public policy documents and multimedia platforms.
  Specific Altmetric streams for researchers, institutions and publishers.
• Altmetric bookmarklet
  Browser add-in which provides altmetrics for individual articles which have DOIs and/or are available via PubMed or arXiv.

• Plum Analytics

  Captures metrics for all types of scholarship and categorizes according to usage, captures, mentions, social media and citations.
  Specific products for institutions, institutional repositories, research departments/groups, research funders.

• Impactstory

  For individual researchers. Tracks and ranks all research outputs via data from citations, social media, data and code repositories and other sources.
  Links to users’ ORCID profiles. Free accounts for Twitter users.

• Research Gate Score

  The academic social networking site, Research Gate, calculates a score based on peer evaluations of users’ contributions. Contributions can include publications, data, etc. Your RG score is weighted by the RG score of whoever is evaluating your work.

The Metrics Tool Kit is an evidence-based resource to help you explore and select metrics that best fit your discipline and desired outcome – e.g. cultural impact, attention/reach.