Scholarly Communication

Creating the scholarly content is part of the scholarly communication process, but understanding what impact that content has on the field is another, equally important part of the process.  There are a number of ways in which the impact of scholarly content can be measured:

• h-index
• Journal Impact Factor
• Citation Analysis
• CiteScore (Scopus)
• Altmetrics

h-index

Author J.E. Hirsch (2005) proposed the h-index, defined as the number of papers with citation number ≥h, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher.  This is an author-level metric.

There are several databases (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar) that will provide an h-index for an individual based on publications indexed in the tools.

Finding Your h-index Using GoogleScholar

• Using your google (gmail) account, create a profile of all your articles captured in Google Scholar.  Follow the prompt on the screen to set up your profile.   Once complete, this will show all the times the articles have been cited by other documents in Google Scholar and your h-index will be provided.  

Finding Your h-index Using Harzing's Publish or Perish

Publish or Perish is freely available software designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage.

1. Click New and select Google Scholar Query to create a new query or select an existing query to modify
2. Enter the author’s name in the Authors field (either first name surname or the first name initial surname)
3. If necessary, restrict the years of publication and perform search (Lookup)
4. Choose the publications you want
5. The h-index will automatically update as you select publications from the list.

Impact Factor

"The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly average number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher impact factor values are often deemed to be more important, or carry more intrinsic prestige in their respective fields, than those with lower values." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor 

The impact factor is based on a two-year period and involves dividing the number of times articles were cited by the number of articles that are citable.

For example, the calculation of 2020 impact  factor of a journal would be:

A = the number of times articles published in 2018 and 2019 were cited by indexed journals during 2020.

B = the total number of "citable items" published in 2018 and 2019.

A/B = 2020 impact factor 

The impact factor can be found on most journal websites in the "About This Journal" section:

Citation analysis is the process of assessing the impact or "quality" of an article by counting the number of times other authors "cite" or reference it in their work.

Citation analysis involves counting the number of times an article is cited by other works to measure the impact of a publication or author.  There is no single citation analysis tool that collects all publications and their cited references.  For a thorough analysis of the impact of an author or a publication, you need to look in multiple databases to find all possible cited references.

Multiple databases that the Wolfgram Library Subscribes to provide citation counts:

• EBSCO Databases (for example: CINAHL, SocIndex with Full Text, ERIC, SportDiscus)
  • Click on Cited References in the top navigation (it may be under a More link).
  • Search for the author (Last name, first initial, example: smith b) or article title - make sure you have the correct author
  • Look for the phrase Times Cited in this Database. Add up the numbers to get a citation count for that database
  • To view the articles citing the original article, check the box(es) next to the results that are cited in the database and click on the Find Citing Articles button.
• Pubmed
  • Go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed and search for the article you are looking for.
  • Click on the title in the results list to see the full record.
  • Look at the right hand column and scroll down until you see Cited by # PubMed Central Articles. If this section does not show up, your article has not been cited in PubMed Central.
  • For a particular researcher's citations, search for their name (last name, first initial, second initial if known. Example: smith ba), check to make sure all of the records are authored by the correct researcher, and then click on each article title to view the citations.
• GoogleScholar
  • To find who cited other people's work, Click on the Cited by link under the citation
  • To find who cited your work, create a GoogleScholar profile.

CiteScore (Scopus) 

Calculating the CiteScore is based on the number of citations to documents (articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers) by a journal over four years, divided by the number of the same document types indexed in Scopus and published in those same four years. 

For example, the 2020 CiteScore counts the citations received in 2017-2020 to articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers published in 2017-2020, and divides this by the number of these documents published in 2017-2020.

From the Scopus.com homepage, click on Sources

The Sources page lists the journals ranked with their CiteScore, Highest Percentile, Citations, Documents, and more listed.

In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.  Altmetrics use public APIs across platforms to gather data with open scripts and algorithms. Altmetrics did not originally cover citation counts, but calculate scholar impact based on diverse online research output, such as social media, online news media, online reference managers and so on. It demonstrates both the impact and the detailed composition of the impact.  Altmetrics could be applied to research filter, promotion and tenure dossiers, grant applications and for ranking newly-published articles in academic search engines. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altmetrics