Scholarly Impact Metrics

Additional Assistance

Interested in learning more about scholarly impact metrics? Please contact your library subject specialist to set up a consultation.

Citation Analysis

Citation analysis is the study of the impact and (assumed) quality of an article based on the number of times a publication has been cited by others in scholarly works.

Citation analysis is used to :

  • discover how many times a scholarly work has been cited
     
  • learn who is citing a specific scholarly work
     
  • track a specific scholar/author
     
  • identify seminal works that are frequently cited
     
  • determine trends in research
 


Pile of Magazines (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Web of Science

Google Scholar

"Publish or Perish," a downloadable software program designed to help individual researcher's determine their scholarly impact, can help untangle Google Scholar citations.

Other Databases

Many of databases now include citation counts for journal articles. These are particularly useful for scholars whose fields aren't well covered in Web of Science or Google Scholar.