Research Impact & Visibility: Traditional and altmetrics

On this page you will find:

• Comparison chart of available traditional and alternative metrics websites (selection; not exhaustive)

You might try one or more of these (see the boxen on the right of this page for explanation):

1. Author level metrics
   Check (and compare) metrics:
   • in Scopus
   • in Web of Science
   • in LENS
   • in Dimensions
   • in Google Scholar Citations
   • in ImpactStory
   • in Plum Analytics
   • in Overton
      
2. Article level metrics
   Check (and compare) the impact of your publications:
   • in Scopus
   • in Web of Science
   • in LENS
   • in Google Scholar
   • in Altmetric
   • in Plum Analytics
   • in Overton
      
3. Institutional level metrics
   Check (and compare) the impact of your organization's publications:
   • in Scopus
   • in Web of Science
   • in Altmetric
   • in Plum Analytics
   • in Overton

On request the library organizes hands-on workshops for UU research groups and graduate schools. Interested? Get into contact.

There are many things you can do to enhance the visibility of your research:

• Analyse who is using your research and through which channels
• Avoid journals that are not well-indexed
• Create an ORCID
• Blog and tweet selectively on your research topics
• Deposit your publications in the university repository
• Produce a short video pitch on your main research topic
• Publish Open Access
• Share an early version of your paper as pre-print (ArXiv, bioRxiv, preprints.org, Cognet, RepEc, SSRN, PeerJ Preprints etc.)
• Share your data (FigShare, Dutch Dataverse network etc.)
• Upload full text of your papers to your researcher profiles or your own website
• Use a stable and full author name and affiliation
• Use research profiles to unambiguously link publications to you

Author level metrics

Open Scopus and search your name using the 'Search author'-tab. Select your name from the results list and scroll down to 'Research' to see various metrics like citations and h-index. You can click on 'View Author Evaluator' or 'View h-graph' to see a visual representation of author metrics.

Tip: In calculating metrics, Scopus only uses data going back to 1995.

Tip: Are there errors in your Scopus listing, e.g. missing documents or multiple author listings (b/c of spelling variants)? You can request changes to be made by clicking 'Request author detail corrections' at the top of the page with author information.

Article level metrics

Open Scopus and search an article or a subject using the 'Document search'-tab. In the results list, the number of citations the article has received is visible in the last column ('Cited by'). Click on this number to see a list of citations; on this page, there is also the option to click 'Analyze results' (top of page) to see a visual representation of article metrics. 

Tip: In calculating metrics, Scopus only uses data going back to 1995.

Institutional level metrics

Open Scopus and search your affiliation using the 'Affiliation search'-tab. In the results list, click on your organization to get an overview of collaborating institutions, subject areas and journal in which your organization has published. To view citation information on all papers from your affiliation, click on the number of documents from your affiliation. In the following screen you can limit these to specific years. At the top of the results lists, tick the checkbox to select all documents (use the dropdown menu to select all documents instead of the current page) and then press 'View citation overview' to view citation information on these documents.
NB. Comprehensive institutional metrics are available from Elsevier's separate product SciVal.

Tip: If the number of documents is too large to show the citation information on screen, you can download the citation information as a .csv file. The maximum number of documents citation information is available on (as .csv-file) is 20.000.

Tip: Scopus might have separate affiliations listed for e.g. research institutes or research schools within a university. You will see these listed in the Affiliation search results. To include papers from these separate affiliations, tick the checkboxes of all relevant affiliations and choose 'Show documents' at the top of the results list.

Author metrics

Open Web of Science and search your name using the 'Author search'-option. Enter your author name, and optionally proceed to select your research domain(s) and organization(s). In the results list, you can opt to view all results, or look at the tab 'Record sets' to distinguish between different authors with the same name and/or multiple entries for your own name (tick the boxes of the appropiate record sets and select 'View records').

You will now see a list with all your publications listed in Web of Science. Click 'Create citation report' (top right) to view author metrics (citations and h-index).

Tip: Web of Science uses ResearcherID to manage author names/citations. If you have a ResearcherID, you can manually add papers authored by you and correct any mistakes. You can also update your ResearcherID from your ORCID account. More information on creating ResearcherID and ORCID is available in workshop 1: Researcher profiles.

Article metrics

Open Web of Science and search an article or a subject using the 'Search' or 'Cited reference search'-options. In the results list, the number of citations the article has received is visible underneath each article ('Times cited'). Click on this number to see a list of citations; on this page, there is also the option to click 'Create citation report' (top right) to see more detailed article metrics. 

Tip: To view a visual representation of backwards and forwards referencing of a given article ('cited in/cited by'), click on the title of the article in the results list and choose 'Citation map' in the 'Cited References' box in the right sidebar.

Institutional metrics

Extensive institutional metrics are available through Thomson Reuters separate product InCites, but some instutional metrics can be derived directly from Web of Science. Search the institution's name in Web of Science 'Basic search' funtion, choosing 'Organization - enhanced' from the drop-down menu on the right. Alternatively, use the 'Select from index' option underneath the drop-down menu to search for the organization's name as used in Web of Science. 

Searching for the organization results in a list of papers that have the organization listed as affiliation in Web of Science. You can limit the results to e.g. specific years using the options on the left sidebar. Then click 'Create citation report' to see aggregated and detailed article metrics for these papers. 

Tip: The Citation Report feature is not available from a search containing more than 10,000 records. You can limit the number of results by restricting results to specific years of publication or other criteria.

Author metrics

Open Google Scholar and search your name or that of a colleague. If a (public) Google Citations profile exists, it will show up at the top of the results list. Click on the profile to see various metrics like citations, h-index and i10-index (the number of publications with at least 10 citations). 

Tip: More information on creating a Google (Scholar) account and activating Google Scholar Citations is available in workshop 1: Researcher profiles.

Article metrics

Open Google Scholar and search an article or subject. In the results list, the number of citations the article has received is visible underneath each article ('Cited by'). Click on this number to see a list of all citations.

Tip: When you access Google Scholar through the website of Utrecht University Library, you will have full-text access to all articles from journals Utrecht University subscribes to (recognizable by 'Fulltext@UBULink')

Article metrics

Open Mendeley (login required) and search an article or subject using the search bar in the tab 'Papers'. For each article, the number of Mendeley users that have added this paper to their Mendeley library ('readers') is shown underneath the information about the article. When you click on the article's title, more information on readership statistics can be found in the right sidebar.

Institutional metrics

Academic institutions can subscribe to Mendeley's Institutional Edition which offers, among other features, information on research production (papers from the institution present in Mendeley) and detailed readership information (which papers Mendeley users from that institution are reading/bookmarking).

Author metrics

Open ImpactStory and click 'Login'to create an account. You can import your research output connected with your ORCID. If needed, you can add articles, datasets etc. by filling out the respective boxes.

Instead of making your own impact report, you can also click on 'See an example profile' on the main website. You are then shown a sample page containing links to articles, a dataset, slides and a webpage.

Each item in your collection will have information added as to how often it is viewed/saved/cited/discussed recommended by scholars (blue boxes) and by the public (green boxes). To view details on these metrics (including their sources) click either on one of the blue/green boxes or on the title of the item. Each metric also carries a percentile range, measured against a reference set of all papers indexed in Web of Science the same year.

Tip: More information on creating an ORCID is available in the LibGuide Researcher profiles.

Article metrics

To view article level metrics in ImpactStory you need to make an impact report as described above under Author metrics. It is not possible to search for individual articles on ImpactStory. 

Article metrics

Altmetric is a commercial provider of altmetrics data. Their distinctive 'Altmetric donut' with data on coverage of articles in social media, news outlets, blogs, Wikipedia etc, is included in various bibliographical databases, such as Dimensions.

Altmetric also offers a free bookmarklet you can add to your browser, that gives altmetrics data for any DOI it detects on a webpage you are viewing. 

Institutional metrics

Altmetric offers subscription to an analytical tool: Altmetric Explorer for institutions, which allows you to see detailed metrics for papers on institutional, departmental and author levels. It can be configured to reflect the structure of an institution's CRIS.

Plum Analytics is a commercial altmetrics product owned by Elsevier. It supplies article level metrics to Scopus and Elsevier's preprint platform SSRN. Plum Analytics also altmetrics data to subscribing institutions by adding the data to their CRIS (research information system).  To see some examples of the metrics Plum captures, go to http://plumanalytics.com/learn/about-metrics/.

Besides traditional citation counts, there are many ways of tracking research impacts. They try to capture the presence in new scholarly venues, presence and impact in social media and other forms of online engagement, such as views, downloads, bookmarks etc. Collectively, we refer to these as altmetrics, as opposed to traditional citation measurement using Web of Science, Scopus and other citation enhanced databases.

Notes:
^a Only items/persons/users included in the system (depends on data collected/uploaded by the users)
^b Paid services: Mendeley Institutional Edition / Altmetric Institutional Edition / Altmetric Explorer
^c With restrictions/limitations
^d Article level metrics (Mendeley, Altmetric) and author profiles (ImpactStory) free to view

^e Only in paid version

partly based on: Users, narcissism and control: tracking the impact of scholarly publications in the 21st century (SURFfoundation, 2012); last (partly) updated October 2021.