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Citation Tracking & Bibliometrics

The citation searching process and the citation indexes available in the world of scholarly publishing.

Bibliometrics

The statistical analysis of books, articles, or other publications.

Bibliometric measures are data about publications, or citation frequency.

Scientometrics is the branch of information science concerned with the application of bibliometrics to the study of the spread of scientific ideas; the bibliometric analysis of science. 

Definitions adapted from Oxford English Dictionary Online

Bibliometric Data Sources

More About Metrics

Metrics & How They're Measured

 

AUTHOR metrics

h-index: The number of papers with citation number higher or equal to h, either overall or based on a date range
  • Invented by Jorge Hirsch (physicist, UCSD; An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2005)
  • Used in Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus
  • Based on years active as well as number of citations of specific articles (as well as your subscription span to Web of Science)
  • Example: h score of 10 = at least 10 articles cited at least 10 times each

Image: By en:user:Ael 2, vectorized by pl:user:Vulpecula (vectorized version of File:H-index_plot.PNG) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 

g-index: The average of citations matched by the number of articles rather than the number of citations matched by the number of articles
  • Invented by Leo Egghe (scientometrician, Belgium; in "Theory and practise of the g-index," Scientometrics, Vol. 69, No. 1 (2006) 131–152)
  • Adds weight to heavily-cited articles in h-index metric

Image: By Ael 2 (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

ARTICLE metrics

  • Citation counts: The number of citations to an article, using citation data indexed in that database -- i.e., Scopus or Web of Science -- or, in the case of Google Scholar, collected by its algorithm

  • Field-Weighted Citation Impact (Scopus): The number of citations received by a document divided by the expected number of citations for a similar document

  • Altmetrics: Online usage and discussion of a scholarly article

JOURNAL metrics

 
Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics)

  • Impact Factor

    • [# of citations in a year]/[total # of articles published in 2 previous years]
    • Eugene Garfield, 1950s

  • Article Influence (uses Web of Science citation data; in Journal Citation Reports or at http://www.eigenfactor.org)

  • Eigenfactor (uses Web of Science citation data; in Journal Citation Reports or at http://www.eigenfactor.org)

 

Scopus (Elsevier)

  • CiteScore: Eight indicators to analyze the publication influence of serial titles

  • Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): Measures contextual citation impact by taking differences in disciplinary characteristics into account; can be used to compare journals in different fields.

  • Scientific Journal Rankings (SJR): Weights the value of a citation based on the subject field, quality and reputation of the source

Journal Citation Reports

The Journal Citation Reports database maintains the original "journal impact factor" calculations for journals in their index, which finds the ratio of published documents to citations in a given JIF year.

The image here is a screenshot of a journal's impact favor calculated for the JCR year and how it compares to other journals in the same field.