Measuring Research Impact: Article Impact

Articles are published in journals. 

Metrics measuring article impact include:

• Number of times an article is cited (citation counts).
• Altmetrics (short for alternative metrics) are increasingly used to capture and measure online sharing, mentions, views and downloads of scholarly works in social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blog post and social bookmarks.

You can use different tools to track citation counts of a publication.  Each tool has its own limitations, and no tool is perfect.

The following sections show you how to count citations using:

• Scopus
• Web of Science
• Google Scholar
• Altmetrics

Scopus calculates the number of citations to a document from other documents within Scopus. This is shown in the right-hand column of the search results screen.

Example: Find the number of times an article is cited in other articles

1. Access Scopus and click the Documents Search tab.
2. Enter article title or keywords.
3. Click Search to begin your document search. 
4. On the result page, you can find the number of times this article has been cited in other articles (Cited by) in the right-hand column.
5. Click on the number to view all citing documents.
6. For further information, please go to Scopus Online Tutorials

The Times Cited count indicates the number of times a published paper was cited by other papers, including conference proceedings papers, book series, and other papers that are indexed in Web of Science.

Example 1: Basic Search 

1. Access Web of Science and select Basic Search.
2. Enter article title or keywords
3. Click Search.
4. On the result page, you can find Times Cited in the right-hand column.
5. Click on the number to view all citing documents.
6. For further information, please go to Web of Science Online Tutorials.

Example 2: Cited Reference Search (Recommended)

Cited Reference Search can be used for finding articles related to a particular article or author. It takes into account also faulty or incomplete references, and thus gives a search result with better coverage than that obtained by the Basic Search command, where the Times Cited function only returns faultless references.

1. Access Web of Science and select Cited Reference Search from the blue drop-down menu next to Basic Search. 
2. Enter the name of the primary Cited Author, the abbreviated title of a Cited Work and the Cited Year.
3. Click Search.
4. After pressing the Search button, we obtain a list of times cited references from the database that meets the search conditions. This time around, the search has produced five references that all seem to refer to the same article, but they are formulated in different ways. In the reference that has been cited 198 times, the information is correctly recorded and these are the same references as those found with the Basic Search function. In addition to these, there are a further four incorrectly recorded references to the article in question (see page number, year). Additionally, instead of using the author's full initials DC, simply D has been used, so the truncation used with the name proved necessary. With this Cited Reference Search we found a further seven articles which include a reference to the article we are interested in. These articles can be looked at more closely by first marking them in the 'Select' and, then clicking the 'Finish Search' button.
5. For further information, please go to Web of Science Online Tutorials.

You can perform a cited reference search in Google Scholar to find out how many articles cite a particular article. If you search for the article in Google Scholar, the "Cited by" count will be displayed under the search result.

Example: Find the number of times an article is cited in other articles (Cited by)

1. Access Google Scholar and select Advanced Scholar Search from the black drop-down menu next to the search box.
2. Enter keywords or elements of a citation. 
3. Click Search to begin your document search. 
4. The search results show citation counts (Cited by) and links to citing articles.

Altmetrics are metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics. They can include citations on Wikipedia and in public policy documents, discussions on research blogs, mainstream media coverage, bookmarks on reference managers like Mendeley, and mentions on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Example: Altmetrics in Scopus

1. Access Scopus and click the Documents Search tab.
2. Enter article title or keywords.
3. Click Search to begin your document search. 
4. Click on the article title to view the details.
5. On the bottom right of the page, you will see the metrics data such as the number of times being saved in Mendeley, the number of Tweets, and the number of mentions on Wikipedia (if available).

Other Altmetrics Tools:

• The Altmetric bookmarklet enables you to see Altmetric data for any published research output with a DOI.
• Impact Story allows the user to create an online profile that gathers usage data from the many online research-sharing platforms.
• Plum Analytics provides a comprehensive measure of a researcher's scholarly impact by gathering data about usage of data sets, open access publications, presentations, blogs and other types of scholarly communication.