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Measuring Research Impact

An introduction to some commonly used metrics for determining the influence of published research.

Citation Count

Looks at how many times articles written by an author have been cited in other articles. Also called "times cited" or "cited references".

Citation Count 

Advantages Limitations
Provides an idea of impact of an author/article based on use in other publications

Different cited reference counts can occur, depending on which source is used
--Google Scholar is known to "over count" or misattribute citations which results in an inflated number

Does not account for use that does not result in a bibliography entry

Not every database provides citation counts

History of Citation Counting - The Science Citation Index, (SCI) founded by Dr. Eugene Garfield in 1960, was a pioneer effort in citation analysis.

Citation counts are available in Scopus.​

  1. Type or paste the article title in the Scopus search box.
  2. Change the search to "Article type"
  3. The number of times the article is cited appears in the Cited by column. Click the number to see the citing articles.

If you get too many results, try refining the search. You can use filters on the results page or the "Search within results" box.

Citation Benchmarking

Citation Benchmarking shows how citations received by this article compare with the average for similar articles. 99th percentile is high, and indicates an article in the top 1% globally. It takes into account:

  • Date of publication
  • Document type
  • Disciplines associated with the source
  • Compared articles within an 18 month window and is computed separately for each of its sources' disciplines

Field-Weighed Citation Impact

Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) - the ratio of the total citations actually received by the denominator’s output, and the total citations that would be expected based on the average of the subject field.

  • The FWCI is the ratio of the document's citations to the average number of citations received by all similar documents over a three-year window. Each discipline makes an equal contribution to the metric, which eliminates differences in researcher citation behavior.
  • FWCI Attempts to account for disciplinary differences in publication patterns
    • ex: medicine has more output and more co-authors than education which is a reflection of research culture, not performance -A denominator of multiple disciplines could allow one field to dominate others (ex. medicine would dominate education)
    • Non-weighted metrics would allow an institution focused on medicine appear to perform better than an institution focused on social sciences
  • FWCI of:
    • *Exactly 1* means the output performs just as expected for the global average
    • More than1 means that the output is more cited than expected according to the global average
      Less than 1 means that the output is cited less than expected according to the global average