There are many tools available for measuring and tracking your research impact.
A citation search allows you to specify an article, author or book and find other articles that have included it in their bibliographies.
You will need to use multiple tools as no one database covers all publications.
Thomson Reuters Web of Science is today's premier research platform, helping you quickly find, analyze, and share information in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. You get integrated access to high quality literature through a unified platform that links a wide variety of content and search terms together, creating one common vocabulary and one seamless search. This citation database allows you to create a citation report and calculate an h-index.
Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research. Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. Like other citation tracking services, it tracks academic articles, but it also counts theses, book titles & other documents towards author citation metrics. It’s free and easy to set up, with a Google account.
Browse the top 100 publications, in order of their 5 year h-index and h-median metrics. To see which articles were cited the most and by who, click on its h-index number to view the articles and the citations underlying the metrics.
From Harzing.com, a well-known resource in scholarly publishing, this free software tool calculates numerous research metrics based on Google Scholar.
The Publish or Perish Book by Please note that comparing across different tools is not advised, as different algorithms and different citation data are used to calculate impact.
More databases are including citation tracking information, including:
The Metrics Toolkit is a resource for researchers and evaluators that provides guidance for demonstrating and evaluating claims of research impact. With the Toolkit you can quickly understand what a metric means, how it is calculated, and if it’s good match for your impact question.
To see who is reading/progressing your research.
To identify potential research collaborators.
To support grant applications.
To report back to funding agencies and industry.
To benchmark beside the performance of peers.
To advance the institution’s ranking in league tables.
To secure job promotion.
It can be difficult for a researcher to keep track of publications as the number of publications in any field increases every year.
These easy steps can raise your visibility:
► Always be consistent with your name, e.g. “Paul P. Smith”, (avoid variations such like “P. P. Smith” or “Paul Smith”.
► Register for an ORCID and/or Researcher ID to distinguish yourself from other researchers.
► Publish in journals with high impact factor.
► Use uniform institutional associations.
► Deposit your publications in Research@THEA.
► Take advantage of search engine optimisation (SEO) by selecting the most appropriate keywords for your publications.
► Join academic social networking sites, such as LinkedIn and/or ResearchGate.
► Use social bookmarking sites.
The h-index is an author-level metric that rates performance based on career publications, as measured by the lifetime number of citations each article receives. The measurement is dependent on quantity (number of publications) and quality (number of citations).
To manually calculate your h-index, organize articles in descending order, based on the number of times they have been cited.
The h-index reflects the number of articles in addition to the number of citations per article. A h-index of 12 would represent 12 published papers by an author that each had 12 or more citations.
The Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the Journal Citations Report (JCR) year. The Impact Factor is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the two previous years. The works may be articles published in the same journal, however, most citing works are from different journals. A 5-year journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the five previous years.
Like the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor use citation data to assess and track the influence of a journal in relation to other journals. (Available for JCR years 2007 and later).
The Eigenfactor Score calculation is based on the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year, but it also considers which journals have contributed these citations so that highly cited journals will influence the network more than lesser cited journals. References from one article in a journal to another article from the same journal are removed, so that Eigenfactor Scores are not influenced by journal self-citation.
The Article Influence establishes the average influence of a journal's articles over the first five years after publication. It is calculated by dividing a journal’s Eigenfactor Score by the number of articles in the journal, standardized as a fraction of all articles in all publications. This measure is nearly equivalent to the 5-Year Journal Impact Factor as it is a ratio of a journal’s citation influence to the size of the journal’s article contribution over a period of five years. A score greater than 1.00 indicates that each article in the journal has above-average influence; under 1.00 indicates that each article in the journal has below-average influence.
SJR is a measure of scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where such citations come from (developed from the information contained in Scopus).
A Citation Map is a graphical depiction showing the citation relationships (cited references and citing articles) between a paper and other papers using several visualization tools. Using citation mapping, you can analyse which researchers are citing you. You can also set up a graphical representation of the papers that you have cited your published work.
To view a citation map simply click on the title of a publication within a results list in Web of Science. From the menu on the left choose 'View Citation Map' and select the citation direction required (forward, back or both).
Bibliometrics is the statistical analysis of articles, books and other publications; measuring impact not quality.
What impact can be measured with bibliometric data?
Article/Book Impact: The impact of works, such as journal articles, books, and conference proceedings can be measured by the number of times they are cited by other works.
Journal Impact: The impact of academic journals can be measured by the number of times their articles are cited and where they are cited.
Researcher Impact: The impact of an individual researcher can be indicated by the number of works a researcher has published and the number of times these works have been cited.
Institutional Impact: The prestige of a department or research area within an institution can be measured by the collective impact of its researchers compared to those at other institutions.
Altmetrics go beyond the traditional citation metrics to measure social visibility around scientific articles. These metrics are based on indicators, such as article views and downloads, tweets, blog mentions, news media and social bookmarking.
See Altmetrics.com for more information or our LibGuide:
A tool to helps scientists explore and share the diverse impacts of all their research products.
Increase the impact of your research.
Uses metrics to help answer the questions and tell stories about research.
You can choose to set up a personal account with the following databases so that new articles citing your chosen articles can be sent to you automatically:
How to set up e-mail citation alerts? Applicable to most databases.
1. Go to your desired article by searching or browsing. For example search for: Stress AND “work related”
2. Click on the title of the article, to view the full record of the article you want to track.
3. Click "Alert me when this article is cited", "Citation alert", "Create citation alert", "Alerts", "E-mail alerts", etc., depending on the database you are using.
4. You will be asked to log into your personal account. Register for a personal account with the database if you have not already done so. Then log into your account.
5. You will then be asked to: enter your e-mail address; enter the name of the alert; set the alert frequency. Save the citation alert.
6. You will be notified via e-mail when the requested article has been cited.
