Bibliometrics is a term encompassing the range of statistical analysis related to publications and their authors. This data is used to develop research impact “profiles” for specific individuals, papers, journals and disciplines, institutions and countries.
Each measure has advantages and disadvantages, related to discipline characteristics, inclusiveness of the measures, and the accessibility of the data; and no single measure should be used in isolation.
A number of databases provide quality citation data about individual papers. They show when and where an original paper has been cited, and by whom, providing an opportunity to learn about other researchers within or related to a discipline as well as illustrating "impact" of that paper.
These are the main, multi-disciplinary sources of citation data:
Open Access Repository (Open Access Repository)
The Open Access Repository (Open Access Repository) counts the "downloads" for individual items it contains and shows the diversity of countries where these have occurred. With content in Open Access Repository searchable via Google, these counts could be used as an indicator of researchers' impacts on peers and the broader community.
If you're an author of a book, you may be interested in its distribution across the world's libraries.
Altmetrics is a term describing a new and growing field. This refers to citations of research outputs in social media e.g. Tweets, mentions in blogs, etc. Altmetrics give us another way to see article, department and university level productivity and impact. Used with caution, this information may support claims related to the breadth of impact of your research.
Altmetrics can measure online engagement by collecting data on:
Activity in social networking platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Academia.edu)
Articles in news publications and communications
X (Twitter) activity
Scholarly and popular blog interest and activity
Number of "Saves" in online reference managers (Mendeley, CiteULike)
Data and software use & reuse (GitHub, FigShare)
Slide presentation views and downloads (SlideShare)
UTAS subscribes to Altmetric.com, a key source of almetric data.
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Over time, your research output might attract activity like this:
Analysis of citation data, rather than just its collection, has become a value-added service of some databases now.
h-index
Measures impact / research contribution of individual or group of researchers
h-index of 15, for example, means that there are 15 items that have been cited 15 or more times
Value will only increase over period of researcher's career
Can only compare h-indices of researchers in same field
Through its Citation Tracker, Scopus will calculate and graphically represent the h-index for individual authors, where papers have been published since 1995.
In Web of Science, the Citation Report includes the h-index
More information about the h-index
g-index
Introduced as an improvement of the h-index which "is insensitive to one or several outstandingly highly cited papers" (Egghe, 2006, p.132)
Measures the global citation performance of set of articles
If set is ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received (together) at least g² citations.
A set of papers has a g-index of g if g is the highest rank, such that the top g papers have, together, at least g²citations
More information about g-index
Contemporary h-index (hc-index)
Based on the h-index, with an age-related weighting to each cited article
More information about hc-index
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