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Research Impact

Tracking and Enhancing the Impact of your Research

Times Cited = number of times an article has been cited.

This number will be dependent on the sources covered by the individual database providing the information.  

Disciplinary databases (e.g. PsycINFO) also provide times cited from sources within their databases.

How Web of Science counts times cited

Note: Self-citations may inflate the citation count. There are many factors that may explain why an article is or is not cited, including bias.

Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) = the ratio of the total citations actually received by the denominator’s output, and the total citations that would be expected based on the average of the subject field.  

The purpose is to be able to compare citation rates to others in the same field, instead of in all fields.  Find in Scopus.

More information on Field-Weighted Citation Impact

Relative Citation Ratio =  a new metric developed within the National Institutes of Health, Office of Portfolio Analysis (OPA) that represents a citation-based measure of scientific influence of one or more articles. It is calculated as the cites/year of each paper, normalized to the citations per year received by NIH-funded papers in the same field and year. A paper with an RCR of 1.0 has received the same number of cites/year as the median NIH-funded paper in its field, while a paper with an RCR of 2.0 has received twice as many cites/year as the median NIH-funded paper in its field.

The NIH iCite tool can be used to find the Relative Citation Ratio and other statistics for articles in PubMed.

See more about the RCR in "Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level."

Article Views/Downloads = some publishers provide information to authors about the number of times the article was viewed or downloaded from the publisher website.  This may only be available to the author.  Preprint repositories may also provide this information.

​Altmetrics = alternatives (to traditional) metrics that include social bookmarking (Mendeley, CiteULike), academic blogs, and social media mentions.  

Scopus provides a suite of altmetrics for each article provided by PlumX (see below) and a number of publishers are now including altmetric information on the article's web page.  You can also download the Altmetric.com bookmarklet (example at right) to find altmetrics for any article on a web page that includes a DOI.   Altmetric information allows you to click through to the source of social media mentions.

 

Additional Information

Citation Alerts

You can set up citation alerts to be notified by email when an article you are interested in is cited. Web of Science and Scopus require that you register with an individual username and password to do this. Google Scholar lets you set up an alert without registering but logging in with your Gmail account will give you access to the "My Citations" section, where you can track citations to all your publications.  Citation alerts can also be set up in WoS and Scopus for author names or identifiers and in Google Scholar for authors who have public profiles.


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