Variety of publishing routes these days, and those in different contexts will value different types: journal articles, monographs, blogs & tweets. Within those who value journal articles, there are measures of quality of the journal and therefore of the research described in it. Just a paper count is not good enough! Webometrics could include: geographic coverage of visitors, academic networks of visitors, people linking to your article/site
Nobel prize, ig nobel prize!
Also Uni management measures research more broadly than just citations… REF: likely to have one methodology for measuring bibliometrics and peer panels for each discipline can choose whether to use this method or not. Also the European Commission & US National scientific bodies. RCUK? Interest in bibliometrics is international! Why the interest in citations? Studies have been done showing correlation with outcomes of RAE panel decisions. Citations bibliometrics are quantitative & therefore summaries of large scale activity can be produced: this is complementary to the “local view” of peer review. Bias is removed in large data collections viewed by external people… eg where written or previous reputations
Mixture of good and bad motivations!
Eg Many articles with many authors in Physics, when compared to History Within a discipline more concerned with articles, citation numbers can also be higher: there are more articles to make citations! Eg Mathematics might not attract so many citations immediately, but will continue to be cited years after the end of a Physics article’s peak. Average numbers of citations vary across disciplines: whether mean or median, but in some disciplines the highly cited articles skew averages more than in others.
Go to Web of Science and try an author search
If you get lots of results, you can use the refinements on the left hand side to help you to identify only the work by your author of interest.
Scroll down to see your search history and get your results of your search!
Second generation counts are like Google PageRank and far more difficult to calculate but indicative of long term impacts. It’s the no. of citations of the papers which cite yours… Percentile indicators are calculated by taking the year and journal and category of a paper and creating a citation frequency index of all papers matching those criteria and determining the percentage of papers at each level of citation. This places a paper relative to others in its field…
Useful for authors to see, themselves. NB based on our subscription data, eg if cited by content we don’t subscribe to, we don’t see… or at least that’s my understanding. NB also that you can subscribe to an alert about your own articles.
(Uni of Warwick has not got a SCOPUS subscription: their main rival is WoK, which was used for the UK REF pilot)
Same paper as in the WoK example… and in fact the citation is for the same paper as WoK found. NB top result from WRAP! (Not sure why, but likely to be because of the “cited by” link: this info comes from G Scholar. Again, not sure why G Scholar can link the WRAP paper to the citation but not the other versions.)
NB the published version does not have a “Cited by” link! However the citation is for the published article. This paper is not listed on WoK, so WoK does not measure citations of it. Also, the paper that cites this one is not a traditional scholarly, published one: it appears to be an online dissertation. G Scholar is therefore useful to the author in addition to what WoK can tell them.
Concern about panel workload as well as disciplines differing
If an author considers citations to be relevant, to some degree, then it doesn’t hurt to be aware of how measurements are taken, and all the tips to increase numbers… since the majority of articles don’t get cited, you can cite yourself and that’s a start. It won’t increase your standing in the eyes of your peers, but it will increase a statistic. If you can get someone else to cite you, then others are more likely to as well: NB that Google puts “cited by” articles first in the results so you don’t even need the citation to be from a peer to boost Google juice and therefore readership, it could be from anyone with a web page who uses a citation format that G Scholar recognises! Even links to your web page or to your paper in WRAP will boost the Google juice of your profile. Therefore difficult to prove the difference WRAP can make.