Subject Guides

Citation Analysis & Metrics

Locate impact factors and related measures, how to locate where and how often authors and articles are cited, and how to create scholar profiles.

Metrics

  • Eigenfactor Score
    The Eigenfactor score measures the overall impact of a journal by looking at when the journal is cited.  Journals that are cited more heavily in high-impact journals will earn  higher score.   Eigenfactor journal scores can be found on Eigenfactor.org
  • H (Hirsch) Index
    The H-index measures productivity of an author and overall impact by taking into account the number of publications by an author, and the number of times they have been cited. H-indexes are available in Web of Science via the Citation Report link, and in Google Scholar Citations profiles.
     
  • Egghe's G-index
    The G-index is based off of the H-index, and is developed to draw attention to the most highly-cited articles.    The G-index can be found using the Publish or Perish tool.

     
  • Impact Per Publication (IPP)
    The Impact per Publication (IPP) measures ratio of citations per article. IPP is found in Scopus. More information is on the Journal Metrics website.
     
  • Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)
    SNIP is the ratio of a journal's citation count per paper and the citation potential in its subject field. The goal is to allow for comparison of sources in different subject fields.

    SNIP is found in the Scopus database and more information about SNIP can be found on the can be found on the Journal Metrics website.

Metric Tools

  • Scimago Journal (SJR) and Country Rank includes data on Journal Rankings, H-index and the number of citations.   Data source: Scopus..   More information is on the Journal Metrics website.
     
  • Publish or Perish measure a number of citation metrics including Hirsch's h-index and Egghe's g-index. Data Source: Google Scholar.
     
  • PlumX categorizes metrics into five categories: usage (views of abstract/html/link), captures (export/save), mentions, social media and citations. This information is integrated into a number of the Libraries' databases, including Science Direct, EBSCO, the ORB, Engineering Village, and Mendeley.

Alternatives to Traditional Metrics (Altmetrics)

Alternative metrics measure the impact of articles outside of traditional publishing, including activity via:

  • discussion or tweets through blogs and on Twitter
     
  • social media mentions on sites such as Facebook
     
  • links and readers via citation management/networking sites such as Mendeley
     
  • numbers of reviews and recommendations
     
  • number of article downloads 

Altmetric Tools

  • Altmetrics.org tracks the impact of research via social media, and provides a place for discussion, research and suggestions for the tools to do so.    
  • Impact Story consolidates activity via journal articles, blog posts, datasets, software to show the reach and openness of your work. Individuals can join for free with a Twitter account.
  • ExLibris also offers the bx Journal Popularity Report  that allows viewing of the most popular journals from its article recommender service by at the journal title level.
     
  • Altmetric Bookmarklet​: Free bookmarklet that displays cites, saves, links and social media mentions for individual articles. Works with Chrome   Firefox, or the Safari browser. 
     
  • Public Library of Science (PLoS): PLoS provides their own article level metrics for publications