FIU Libraries: Citation Analysis & Journal Rankings: Author Impact

What will you find here?

The tools on this page will help to answer the question, "How many times and where was an article or author cited?"

Citation analysis is the study of citations to and from documents. It is the study of the impact and assumed quality of an article, an author or an institution based on the number of times works and/or authors have been cited by others.

Keep in mind that there isn't a single database that keeps tracks of all the journal articles that have cited your work. You may have to check citations to your work in multiple databases to get a sense of a fuller range of your work's importance.

Why is it important?

To establish the impact that a particular work has had by identifying what authors based their work upon it or cited it within their own papers.
To learn more about a field or a topic by identifying seminal works in that area.
To determine what impact a particular author has had within his/her own discipline and beyond by looking at his/her total number of citations
For promotion and tenure purposes by looking at the quality of sources where a scholar’s work has been published and cited

You will find resources to find the h-index or Hirsch index which measures the impact of a scholar rather than a journal. It is a metric to evaluate the cumulative impact of a researcher's scholarly output and performance.

H-Index = number of papers (h) with a citation number ≥ h.

The h is the highest number of publications of a scholar that received h or more citations. For example, a scholar with an h-index of 5 published 5 papers, each of which has been cited by others at least 5 times.

Please note than an individual's h-index is likely to be different in different databases because of the journals each database indexes.

Advantages of the H-Index:

Allows for direct comparisons within disciplines.
Measures quantity and impact by a single value.

Disadvantages of the H-Index:

Does not give an accurate measure for early-career researchers.
Calculated by using only articles that are indexed in Web of Science.

Measuring your Research Impact: h-index
From Cornell University.

Information on the g-index.

The g-index was proposed by Leo Egghe in "Theory and Practice of the g-index, 2006", as an improvement to the h-index. It gives more weight to highly-cited articles.

Advantages:

Accounts for the performance of author's top articles.
Helps to make more apparent the difference between authors' respective impacts. The inflated vales of the g-index help to give credit to lowly-cited or non-cited papers while giving credit for highly cited papers.

Disadvantages:

The debate continues whether the g-index is superior to the h-index. It is not as widely accepted as the h-index.

The i10-index is a metric used by Google Scholar. It is the number of publications with at least 10 citations for all of the citations listed in your profile.

Advantages:

Easy to use

Disadvantages:

Only available in Google Scholar

Altmetrics, or alternative metrics, measure the impact of scholarly work through an analysis of mentions in social media, blogs, news outlets, and more. It allows for more immediate analysis of impact and can be applied to articles, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.

By using public APIs across platforms, Altmetrics calculates scholarly impact based on signs of usage (downloads, clicks, patents, syllabi, etc.), captures (bookmarks, favorites), mentions (new articles, blog posts, Wikipedia references), and social media (Tweets, shares, likes, comments). It shouldn't be used as the single impact measure.

Advantages:

Accumulates metrics faster compared to traditional citation counts
Measures beyond books and articles to include data sets, presentations, videos, web pages, etc.
Provides a wider net for measuring impact of research (sometimes important to funders)

Disadvantages:

Should be used with other metrics
Easy to misinterpret
Indicators are based on sharing which does not measure true impact
Focus on what is popular at the moment
Easy to artificially inflate impact

Plum Analytics
Metrics are displayed using the PlumX Wheel which places activity into five categories: Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media, and Citations. Available in many library databases.
altmetrics
A free website that serves as central hub for information about the altmetrics movement. The almetrics movement is defined as "the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for analyzing and informing scholarship".
PLOS: Article-Level Metrics (ALM)
Part of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), ALM provides both academic and social metrics for its open source journals. Draws information from several sources including views in PubMed, saves in Mendeley, citations in Scopus and Web of Science, and mentions on social media.
ImpactStory
Website that helps researchers explore and share the online impact of their research.
Publish or Perish
A software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations; it is designed to help scholars present their case for research impact.
Mendeley
Metrics include how often papers are downloaded, shared with colleagues, and commented on.
Kudos
Provides number of publication views, full-text downloads on publisher site, share referrals, and Kudos views (i.e. the total number of visits to your publication page on the Kudos site.
Scholarometer
From Indiana University, a browser extension that provides a smart interface for Google Scholar to facilitate citation analysis and help evaluate impact

Social Sciences Citation Index This link opens in a new window
Provides access to current and retrospective bibliographic information, author abstracts, and cited references found in over 1,700 of the world's leading scholarly social sciences journals covering more than 50 disciplines, plus individually selected, relevant items from approximately 3,300 of the world's leading science and technology journals.
Web of Science Core Collection This link opens in a new window
Click the Cited Reference tab and search for author by last name first initial* (include the * after the 1st initial).
Scopus This link opens in a new window
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. Delivering a comprehensive overview of the world's research output in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities, Scopus features smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research.

This database includes an AI component (like a Research Assistant) that employs a large language model (LLM) to interpret user queries and respond using a curated collection of proprietary materials.

Google Scholar Metrics
Analyzes the the last five years of journal articles from websites that follow Google's inclusion guidelines as well as conference articles and preprints from a small number of manually identified sources. Excludes publications with less than 100 articles during the five-year period and those with no citations.
Publish or Perish
A software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations; it is designed to help scholars present their case for research impact.
SemanticScholar
Search more than 40 million scientific papers; find an analysis that pulls out authors, references, figures, and topics.
Mendeley
Metrics include how often papers are downloaded, shared with colleagues, and commented on.
Research.com
A research portal for scholars. Search for scientists, conferences, and journal rankings.

Journal Citation Reports This link opens in a new window
Citation analysis data of 7,600+ journals, including impact factors; Includes JCR Science Edition and JCR Social Sciences Edition.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Search by author, title of article, or source title by using the Cited Reference feature available at the top of the main search page. Once you locate the article you are interested in, select it and click Find Citing Articles.

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