Introduction
Introduction
Researchers and academic staff are often required to demonstrate the impact of their research when applying for research grants, promotions and new positions.
Citation metrics are used to measure the impact of scholarly works within academia.
Standard citation metrics include citation counts and the h-index. These measures assume that significant scholarly works will have higher citation counts.
Citation count refers to the number of times a scholarly work is cited. The h-index or Hirsch index measures a researcher's productivity and citation impact. A researcher has an h-index of h if his/her papers are cited at least h-times.
- Metrics toolkitThe Metrics toolkit provides guidance on the appropriate use of research metrics
- MyRI bibliometrics tutorialThe MyRI tutorial is a step-by-step guide to standard metrics used to measure research performance
Citation databases
Citation databases are used to measure individual and institutional citation performance. Several citation databases should be used to calculate citation impact as journal indexing and citation counts vary in each database.
The most comprehensive sources of citation data are the Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar databases.
- Google ScholarCheck who is citing your publications and more. Make your profile public, so that it appears when people search for your name.
- InCites (La Trobe users only)Based on Web of Science citation metrics. Used to analyse individual and institutional productivity including benchmarking.
- SciVal (La Trobe users only)Based on the Scopus database. Used to find collaborators and benchmark individual and institutional research performance.
- Scopus (La Trobe users only)World’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature with smart tools that track, analyse and visualise research.
- Web of Science (La Trobe users only)Key provider of citation information. Includes over 12,000 of the highest impact journals in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.
Citation counts are also available from subject-specific databases. A list of citation databases is available here.