Research Guides: Scholarly Impact Metrics: Article Impact

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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

Web of Science
Web of Science contains citations to articles in highly ranked, high impact publications. The database is particularly strong is in the sciences, but does have citations to publications from the humanities and social sciences as well.

Below is a brief video demonstrating how to do a cited reference search in Web of Science.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar
Google Scholar indexes many types of scholarly works, such as peer-reviewed journal articles, books, presentations, and reports from different disciplines.

Be careful using Google Scholar to obtain citation counts; not only does Google Scholar include citations from non-scholarly or non-peer reviewed sources, but it does not de-duplicate results. Both these practices can contribute to a citation count number from scholarly or peer-reviewed sources that is inaccurate.

"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.

List of Databases at the EMU Library
An A to Z list of over 220 databases available to the EMU community.

Be aware that these databases usually include only citations from articles in journals that are included in the database, so they are certainly not comprehensive.