This page provides guidance and tutorials for how to get access, use and correct some of the key metrics you be familiar with, are asked to provide (by journals, colleagues, funders) or come across elsewhere. This includes:
Please see our Responsible Metrics Guide for guidance on using publication and citation research indicators responsibly and appropriately, or our overview of bibliometric indicators guide for information about different metrics available. If you need any further help, please contact us directly.
There are five key sources of publication citation data:
Web of Science can be accessed here.
Web of Science Core Collection provides a collection of citation indexes covering over 21,000 journals, books and conference proceedings. The video below shows you how to run a cited reference search within the database.
Scopus claims to be the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, providing access to over 22,000 active titles. The video below shows you how to view citing and related articles within Scopus.
Dimensions can be accessed here.
Dimensions provides access through its free service to over 100 million publications (including published articles, books and book chapters, preprints and conference proceedings). The video below provides an overview of the service, and the citation, altmetric and other related information it provides.
Google Scholar can be accessed here.
Google Scholar is a search engine focussed on scholarly and professional research literature. You can see citing articles under results from any search in Google Scholar.
You can also use freely available software such as Publish or Perish to quickly view and re-order citing articles, alongside other citation metrics.
You can access and install the Altmetric Bookmarklet here.
Altmetric.com provides a free browser plugin for researchers, allowing you to quickly view and access the altmetric data for many articles you might find online, at the click of a button. The video below shows how this works.
Visit our Altmetrics Guide for further information about Altmetric Explorer for Institutions, which provides views of altmetric data at an author, department or institution level (Coming Q4 of 2020).
PlumX Metrics, owned by Elsevier, are another provider of altmetric data. You can often see data from PlumX Metrics in databases such as Scopus, Science Direct, or some of those hosted on the Ebscohost platform (Business Source Complete, Anthropology Plus, PsycINFO, British Education Index, etc.)
You can also quickly see PlumX data using the tip below:
For any article with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), just type https://plu.mx/a/?doi= , followed by the DOI, into your browser to see altmetric data from PlumX Metrics...
For example: https://plu.mx/a/?doi=10.1002/14651858.cd003177.pub.
Dimensions can be accessed here.
Dimensions provides access through its free service to over 100 million publications (including published articles, books and book chapters, preprints and conference proceedings). The video below provides an overview of the service, and the citation, altmetric and other related information it provides.
Kudos provides a free service, with simple tools and guidance to help increase the visibility of your research, and monitor and track the wider impact through citation and altmetric data.
I've been asked to supply authors H indexes for a paper submission and they want them from ISI-WoS but they are so often much lower than google scholar, AND wrong! Any advice/thoughts on this?
— Dr Lizzy Lowe (@LizyLowe) August 6, 2018
Your h-index will vary, dependent upon the source of data used to calculate it. You should always use a source of data which is comprehensive in terms of coverage of your publication output, and the output which cites it. Key sources include:
Scopus claims to be the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, providing access to over 22,000 active titles.
Viewing the h-index for an author: An author profile within Scopus displays the h-index, calculated from the publications associated with that author profile.
For a set of publications:
Web of Science can be accessed here.
Web of Science Core Collection provides a collection of citation indexes covering over 21,000 journals, books and conference proceedings. The video below shows you how to run a citation analysis for any set of publications you have searched for or created within Web of Science.
Web of Science has an Author Search tool, which is similar to the author profiles available within Scopus (in that they are initially automatically generated, but can be claimed by an author and maintained), where you can view an H-index for that author, based on the publications linked to that profile.
You can create an author profile within Google Scholar, and it will automatically calculate both your h-index and h5-index (your h-index limited to only publications published and citations received within the last 5 years) from the publications associated with your author profile.
It is worth noting that citation counts, and metrics derived from them, are nearly always higher in Google Scholar than in other data sources. Our blog post here explores the reasons why this is.
