Central to using bibliometrics is understanding the scope (strengths, weaknesses, coverage and parameters) of the database and metrics being used. Importantly:
Although bibliometrics provide quantitative data that can be used to evaluate authors and institutions, the limitations of bibliometric analysis mean that
Database | Description | Help |
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Web of Science | Contains descriptions of scholarly literature in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. The records contain cited references. | Help |
Scopus | Major academic database, publisher and indexer with high entry criteria | Help |
SciVal | Research performance assessment tool which uses data from Scopus. Provides more advanced metrics than those available in Scopus only and also allows you to benchmark individual researchers, groups of researchers and institutions based on a variety of different metrics. |
Help |
Dimensions |
A citation database, a research analytics suite, and streamlined article discovery and access. Includes publications, funding, patents, clinical trials, and policy documents linked through billions of connections and contextualised with metrics and Altmetrics.Does not use a curated index as seen with Scopus and WoS, instead, it updates content continuously, but there is no listing of included or excluded content coverage. |
Help |
Google Scholar |
Provides information about who is citing your publications and graphs of citations to your work over time. It does not use a curated index as seen with Scopus and WoS, instead, it updates content continuously, but there is no listing of included or excluded content coverage. Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic citation data may be analysed using the free tool Publish or perish |
Help |