Faculty Research Guide: Impact Metrics

While no number can truly measure the value of your work, citation and other metrics can provide a starting point for measuring a work's impact. There are several tools and methods available to measure various types of impact.

Metrics that quantify the use of scholarly publications are available at three levels.

• Document-level metrics include any measures of the influence of a single publication. The most metrics are available for journal articles, but some can apply to books, chapters, or other individual publications. They include times cited, article downloads, and most Altmetrics.
• Author-level metrics aggregate the metrics of all of an author's publications to summarize his or her career overall. These metrics include the h-index and related measures, as well as citation totals.
• Journal-level metrics are intended to describe the influence of a journal overall. The Journal Impact Factor is the most widely used metric at this level.

Most metrics at all three levels are based in counting citations among scholarly publications. Some emerging alternative metrics (Altmetrics) assess other measures of use and influence, such as the number of times a publication is read, downloaded, saved, mentioned, or cited in popular online sources.

Scopus Author profiles and Author metrics allow users to:

• Analyze and track an individual author’s citation history
• Review an author’s total citation and document counts from the author details page
• Access graphs and charts of document and citation trends

Available author metrics include:

• h-index and h-graph: Rates a scientist's performance based on his or her career publications, as measured by the lifetime number of citations each article receives. The measurement depends on both quantity (number of publications) and quality (number of citations) of an academic's publications. 
• Citation overview tracker: An adjustable table that includes the number of times each document has been cited per publication year. 

• Analyze author output: A collection of in-depth and visual analysis tools designed to provide a better picture of an individual’s publication history and influence

Explore an Author's output to see which research areas they are active in and their impact by reviewing:

• Documents by subject
• Documents by source
• Documents by type
• Documents by year
• Total citations
• h-index
• Co-authors
• Most contributed Topics (available on Author Details page)
• Preprints (available on Author Details page)
• Awarded grants (available on Author Details page)

For more information, see How to assess an author's impact tutorial.

Document-level metrics quantify the reach and impact of published research. Scopus integrates data from PlumX Metrics as the primary source of its article-level metrics, along with traditional measures (such as citations) to present a richer and more comprehensive picture of an individual article’s impact. 

Metrics include:

• Citations in Scopus
• Views Count
• PlumX (see below for more details)

With Scopus document metrics, you can:

• See citation overviews
• Create graphs
• Compare citation counts
• Link to citing documents 

For more information, see How to view document metrics in Scopus tutorial.

Altmetrics (alternative metrics) are measures of the impact of published research beyond traditional citations, which can be used to supplement the information gained from traditional bibliometrics. In Scopus they can show scholarly interest (eg Mendeley bookmarking), media interest (eg news stories), or public engagement (eg social media activity).  They can also be used to identify the use of research in policy documents or other official publications which may not appear in the conventional citation databases. 

Scopus includes altmetric data relating to individual publications using PlumX metrics. PlumX Metrics are divided into five categories:

• Citations: This category contains both traditional citation indexes, such as Scopus, as well as citations that help indicate societal impact, such as clinical, patent or policy citations.
• Usage: This indicates how often people are reading an article or otherwise using the research. After citations, usage is the statistic that most interests researchers.
• Captures: A capture indicates that someone wants to come back to the work — and it can be a leading indicator of future citations.
• Mentions: This measures activity such as news articles or blog posts about research. It’s a way to tell that people are truly engaging with the research.
• Social media: This category includes tweets, Facebook “likes” and other social media posts that reference the research. Social media can help measure buzz and attention. Social media can also be a good measure of how well a particular piece of research has been promoted.

A prominent online presence helps you share your work through increased visibility, track your impact in the field, and network with others. It also fosters an identifiable personal brand; allowing you to market your achievements. A variety of social networks and other tools help you reach an increasingly varied audience beyond traditional scholarly outlets. 

Many research metrics rely on citation as a key factor in their formulas. Citation is inherently political and replicate the sexist and racist biases of our society. Because of the role citation counts play in many metrics, consider the role of citation for marginalized scholars and how their works may be impacted.

• The Racial Politics of Citation

  An Inside Higher Ed summary of recent empirical research on citation biases by race

• Growing Citation Gender Gap

  Nature article summarizing gender disparities in citation patterns.

• Cite Black Women Collective

  An organization advocating for greater citation and inclusion of the research written by Black women