Skip to main content
It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.
Library Guides

Bibliometrics

This guide explains the measures used for academic papers

Document-level metrics

  • At the heart of bibliometric analysis is the publication of an article, chapter or book and a measurement of the subsequent citations it receives.
  • A citation ‘count’ may be automatically compiled by the hosting database or an indexing service and displayed alongside the document.
  • Article-level metrics can be ‘rolled up’ to analyse the performance of a journal title. The ‘main-players’ for journal-level metrics are Elsevier (a publisher and indexer) and Clarivate Analytics (indexer only).
  • Not all journal titles are indexed and only publications indexed by Elsevier in Scopus form the data set that is analysed for international university rankings.

Scopus document-level metrics

In some bibliometric databases that ‘count’ may be contextualised by a percentile or Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) comparison with similar documents.  

For example, the Scopus database has counted 380 citations for the following article, it is in the 99th percentile and it has a Field-Weighted Citation Impact of 9.73, when compared with similar documents.  

Dimensions document-level metrics

At the document level Dimensions uses the Field Citation Ration (FCR) The FCR indicates the relative citation performance of a publication when compared to similarly-aged articles in its subject area. A value of more than 1.0 indicates higher than average citation, when defined by Field of Research (FoR) subject code, and publication year. Dimensions also has a Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) metric for articles published in PubMed. Search for the article and click on the Dimensions Badge for additional information about the article.