RESEARCH SUPPORT : Research Impact Library Guide

• Research impact measures are not comparable across disciplines.  For example, citation counts in Social Sciences and Humanities are lower because researchers are more often publishing in books and conference papers that are not well covered by citation databases.

• No one database will provide a comprehensive measurement of impact. Variations occur because citation tools have different source materials, date ranges and sometime erroneous records.     There is no single tool for catching all citations so you need to use a number of tools to try to cover all bases.

• The results between citation databases are not comparable since their coverage varies.

• Citation counts alone are not an indication of excellent research.  The numbers that are generated are not absolutes.   They should be used with other qualitative measures such as esteem.

Citation tracking, or citation analysis is an important tool used to trace scholarly research, measure impact, and inform tenure and funding decisions.It looks at the number of times that a work has been cited in the bibliographies of other works. 

The impact of an article is evaluated by counting the number of times other authors cite it in their work.   A high number of citations usually indicates a highly regarded work, but it can also indicate a well-known but controversial work to which a number of authors have referred. 

Researchers do citation analysis for several reasons:

• find out how much impact a particular article has had, by showing which other authors have cited the article in their own paper
• find out how much impact a particular author has had by looking at the frequency and number of his/her total citations
• discover more about the development of a field or topic (by reading the papers that cite a seminal work in that area)

In this guide we suggest tools that let you:

• manage your research identity
• find and track your citations

Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets or one stop shops -  you need to use a number of tools to cover all bases.  

Citation databases track citations included in the reference lists of publications. 

Results of citation analysis will vary dependent upon the database used. This variation may occur because databases index different publication sources, across different publication date ranges. Some variation may also occur due to the inclusion of poor quality data - such as duplicate records, misspelt citations, missing authors and other citation data.

Many databases include citation count data. However, no single database will index all publications by an individual researcher. 

A researcher's h-index can be calculated manually by locating citation counts for all published papers and ranking them numerically by the times cited.       

Some databases and tools, like Web of Science, Scopus and Publish or Perish,  will calculate this for you. 

• Web of Science - multi-disciplinary citation database of peer-reviewed literature with tools to track, analyze and visualize research. 
• Scopus - multi-disciplinary citation database of peer-reviewed literature with tools to track, analyze and visualize research. Citations from 1996.
• Google Scholar Citation Profile -  creates an h-index for you.  
• Publish or Perish - software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these 
• Scholarometer -  an add-on tool on either Chrome or Firefox which allows authors to extract their own bibliographic data, curate it, annotate it and export it to other tools or share it.  It computes metrics such as the h-index.