Bibliometrics are a range of quantitative measures that assess the impact of research outputs using citation counts. The metrics can:
While bibliometrics are an established tool for tenure and promotion evaluation and grant awarding bodies, some limitations include a narrow view of the data (downloads or citations alone do not communicate the full impact of research, social media impact is not captured), the lead time for impact to be established (cumulative citation to measure impact takes time, so early career scholars will have less citations), and a bias toward certain groups or industries (where journal articles, books/chapters, or conference papers are the main form of scholarly communication).
An author's impact on their field or discipline has traditionally been measured using the number of times their academic publications are cited by other researchers. Commonly used metrics (adapted from Cornell Library) include:
The most widely used research metric, measures both productivity and impact of an author's scholarly output. Tools for calculating your H-index include Web of Science and Google Scholar.
Proposed in 2006 by Leo Egghe as an alternative to the H-index, adds more weight to highly cited articles.
A very simple measure of impact, this metric is only used by Google Scholar.
Journal impact metrics reflect the number of articles published and citations to those articles and can be used to assess the importance of a particular journal in a field. Journal impact metrics (adapted from Cornell Library) include:
A product of ISI Web of Knowledge, this database provide impact factors and rankings of many journals in the social and life sciences.
These alternative measure of journal importance in a field are available from the Eigenfactor website.
This website uses citation data from Scopus, a scholarly research database. It also provides rankings by journal country of origin.
