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Understanding your research metrics

Bibliometrics is the quantitative analysis of research literature, based upon citations, and can be used to evaluate the impact on the academic community of a research paper, an individual researcher, a research group or institution, or a journal.

The most commonly used bibliometric indicators include journal metrics and researcher metrics and alternative metrics are now increasingly being used.

Journal metrics

  • The Impact Factor is probably the most widely recognised journal metric. The citation data is taken from the Web of Science database and published by Thomson Reuters as the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). There are separate editions for Science and for Social Sciences. JCR enables you to find information on leading journal titles in a subject field and compare the impact of individual titles.
  • The Eigenfactor, developed at the University of Washington and based on citation data in JCR, measures the number of times articles from a journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year. It includes subject coverage in both the Sciences and Social Sciences.
  • SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) published by Elsevier is based on Scopus data from 1996 and covers some Arts and Humanities subjects, unlike JCR. 
  • Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) also published by Elsevier and based on citation data in Scopus measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. So disciplines with smaller publication rates can be compared to ones with higher rates. It is defined as the ratio of a journal's citation count per paper and the citation potential (average length of lists of reference lists in a field) for the journal's subject field.
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