Optimising your research impact

Scopus: A citation index database from Elsevier, Scopus is an alternative to Web of Science. It offers similar citation analysis metrics as Web of Science to measure the impact and influence of research productivity.

Altmetrics: Altmetrics cover citation counts and other aspects of the impact of a work, such as how many data and knowledge bases refer to it, article views, downloads, or mentions in social media and news media.

Citations: Citations are references to sources used to create a published or unpublished work. Citation data is widely used for citation analysis. They are used to measure research impact and productivity of individuals, institutions and to assess the impact and influence of scholarly publications. Web of Science and Scopus are two prominent citation databases which offer citation analysis metrics.

ORCiD: Open Researcher & Contributor ID is a non-profit, open-source digital author ID. It can be used by itself or can be linked to a ResearcherID or an Author Identifier ID.

Impact factor: Journal impact factors are found in Journal Citation Reports, a product of Thomson Reuters (providers of Web of Science). It measures the quality of a journal by calculating the number of citations received by the journal from other journals within the Web of Science database.

Author identifier: An author identifier tool used by Scopus. Each author in Scopus is assigned a unique identifier number. Author identifier matches variations in author’s names and distinguishes between authors who share common names. Documents written by that author are listed under the author’s name bearing the unique identifier number.

Researcher ID: An author identifier tool used by Thomson Reuters. Each member is assigned a unique identifier which can be used by researchers to manage their publication lists, track their citation counts, calculate their h-index and identify research collaborators.

Bibliometrics: Refers to quantitative ways of measuring and analysing research productivity. Bibliometrics measures the research productivity of individuals, research teams, institutions, and countries, identifies research strengths, collaborations, research trends, funding sources and emerging research fields.

SJR: SCImago Journal Rank (available from Elsevier’s Scopus) measures the scientific influence of scholarly journals. It considers the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of those citing journals.

Web of Science: A Thomson Reuters citation database, Web of Science includes the Science Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index. It uses several citation analysis metrics to measure the impact and influence of research productivity. Other Reuters’ products which draw on the citation data are Essential Science Indicators and Journal Citation Reports.

JCR: Journal Citation Reports are a product of Thomson Reuters (providers of Web of Science). They use citation data to enable the comparison and evaluation of scholarly journals.

SNIP: Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (available on Elsevier’s Scopus) measures the ratio of a journal’s average citation count per paper, taking into account characteristics of the journal’s subject field. The impact of a single citation is given higher value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa.

h-index: A popular form of citation analysis. The h-index looks at the total number of papers published by an author, and the number of citations these papers have received.

Citation analysis: This measures the quality of the academic work by analysing the amount of times it is cited. Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar collect and provide citation data.

Journal rankings: Compiled lists measuring and ranking the quality and impact of academic journals.

Google metrics: Google Scholar metrics measures the impact and influence of articles in scholarly publications. The metrics provide citation counts for articles found within Google Scholar.

Eigenfactor: The Eigenfactor metric measures journal influence. It weights a journal’s citations by the influence of the citing journals. From 2007, the Eigenfactor metrics is included in Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports in both Science and Social Sciences.