Demonstrate Your Impact: What are Metrics?
Article Metrics: What do they mean and why are they important to researchers?
What are Metrics?
Publication metrics are quantitative measures of a scholarly work's reach, influence, and impact. Researchers and publishers have developed many different algorithms and measures to capture and communicate the importance of scholarly works. Metrics might be displayed differently in different databases. They could be as simple as citations to an article, or might include more information, including other measures of an article's impact. Some examples include:
- Scopus SourcesScopus uses CiteScore to measure citation and impact. This lists all indexed Scopus sources and their CiteScores.
- AltmetricA tool that tracks qualitative data about publications. It tracks citations in public policy documents, on Wikipedia, on social media, in the news, and more.
- Web of ScienceMaintains citation searching for high impact research journals in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences and includes emerging sources citation indexing from 2005.
Metrics Examples
Typically metrics can be viewed on Journal web pages as well as article records at publisher websites as well as in some research databases. Below are some examples.
Publishers' websites will often provide information on how many times an article has been cited as well as a link to social media analytics, as depicted by the Journal of Materials Science article below.
Some journal sites will also provide journal Impact Factor, other journal rankings, as well as citing article information on article abstract pages as depicted below in the example from Journal of Planning Education and Research.
PDXScholar provides download counts for any materials included in it, as shown by the technical report, Home Forward's Aging in Place Initiative.
