Journal Metrics
Scopus provides CiteScore, an alternative to Web of Science's proprietary Journal Impact Factor. Scopus is a large citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings with over 22,000 titles from more than 5,000 publishers. USU provides a tutorial on using this database, include how to access CiteScore journal metrics.
Eigenfactor was developed by faculty at the University of Washington. Eigenfactor aims to measure a journal's total importance to the scientific community. Eigenfactor metrics are freely available; their algorithms use the structure of the entire citation network (as opposed to purely local citation information) to evaluate the importance of each journal.
Scimago journal rank is a tool that includes the journals and country scientific indicators (normalized on a scale of 0 to 100) that takes into account the number of citations to a journal, prestige of where those citations come from, and more. Scimago provides an alternative to Web of Science's Journal Impact Factor.
Author Impact
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. There are numerous algorithms that account for such things as the recency of the publication, or poorly or highly cited papers. While citation metrics may reflect the impact of research in a field, there are many potential biases with these measurements and they should be used with care. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a critique of author impact factors. See the Research Impact & Engagement guide for information beyond what is listed below.
- H-IndexThe 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.
- G-IndexProposed in 2006 by Leo Egghe as an alternative to the H-index, adds more weight to highly cited articles.
- i10-IndexA very simple measure of impact, this metric is only used by Google Scholar.
- Publish or PerishPublish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents results.
- CiteScore Journal MetricsCiteScore is a product from Elsevier, using citation data from the Scopus database to rank journals. As with other journal ranking metrics, to compare journals across disciplines requires a "normalized" ranking, which CiteScore provides as a percentile ranking within the journal's subject category. In addition to the CiteScore number and percentile ranking, CiteScore also includes the SJR (Scimago Journal Rank) and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) numbers.
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