How to explore and improve the impact of your publications

Data relating to the citation rates and patterns for published works (commonly called 'bibliometric' data) are increasingly being used to assess the impact of research, to track and evaluate research activity. For example, the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF2014), the successor to the RAE, will include some bibliometric assessments alongside more qualitative assessments. Bibliometric data are available from a range of sources and there are various different measures which can be applied.

To find out more, you could attend the Queen Square Library's monthly training course: "Maximising and measuring your publications  impact". View our training calendar for details of the next course date(s).

An important note about attribution

It is important for you to explore your personal profile in the tools discussed below and to correct any errors that you might find. Some of your papers may not have been correctly assigned to you, or papers that you did not write may have been falsely assigned to you. It is also important to ensure that papers you have authored while at UCL are correctly attributed to UCL. More information about how to identify and correct errors are available below.

What bibliometric measures are there?

The most commonly used measures for assessing the impact of a particular journal, paper, or researcher are listed below, along with information about which tools are available at UCL to help you to access these measures for your own (and others') publications.

Other measures: with the advent of social media, including blogs, twitter and the like, some researchers are looking into altmetrics, but this is a relatively new area. If you are a keen user of social media, you might wish to read the altmetrics manifesto.

What tools are there?

Journal Impact Factors

Publishing your papers in high impact journals can help to give them more exposure, which in turn can lead to higher citation counts. There are a number of tools which can help you to assess the 'impact factor' of a journal, or to compare a number of journals.

The most established  measure is the Journal Impact Factor, available from the Journal Citation Reports. Other, newer measures and tools include: Scimago and the Scopus Journal Analyzer.

Journal Impact Factor (JIF) - available from Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which is accessible via the Web of Knowledge. The JCR is the key source of information about the impact of a journal, giving impact factors, cited half-life and immediacy indices for each title. JCR covers specialties in the areas of science, technology, and the social sciences and is updated annually in two editions. The Science edition covers over 5,000 journals; the Social Sciences edition covers over 1,500 journals.

Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) - available from: www.scimagojr.com & using an algorithm similar to Google's PageRank to indicate 'journal influence'. Scimago also provides an H index for each journal.

Scopus Journal Analyzer - available from: www.scopus.com (click Analytics). The Journal Analyzer uses a combination of SJR (see above) and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) to rate the quality of a journal. You can compare up to 10 journals within a particular field.

Times cited

The number of times a paper is cited by others gives an indication of the impact that paper is having. A number of tools will allow you to search for a paper and view a simple count to show how often that paper has been cited. The tools include:

Note that you will find a different answer depending on the tool you use because each tool draws upon a different set of citation data. When quoting the times cited, it is a good idea to also indicate which tool you used, and the date you checked (remember that, hopefully, the number of times cited will increase over time!).

h-index

The h-index (or Hirsch index) is a relatively new, but increasingly important, method of assessing the impact of an individual's publications. The h-index uses a calculation based on the citation rates of an author's published papers. For more information about the h-index see articles in PNAS and Nature and Wikipedia's definition.

How to calculate your h-index - use either Web of Knowledge or Scopus.

  • Bear in mind these h-index health warnings:
  • Always remember to check that all the publications in the list are yours and that none of your papers are missing before generating a citation report.
  • Are all the papers yours? papers by authors with the same name & initial as you may be incorrectly included in the report. Always scan through the list and exclude papers that are not yours. Some refining of the list by publication address (e.g. postcode) may help.
  • Are all your papers included? Some of your papers may be published in journals which are not covered by the Web of Science or Scopus database; these cannot be included in the Citation Report and it is not possible to add them. However, if a paper is included in the database, but has been mis-named or mis-attributed, please contact the Library and we can try to assist you.
  • Your h-index will change! Over time, your h-index will change as you publish more papers and they are cited by others.

Instructions for using Web of Science to generate an h-index:

  • Login to the Web of Knowledge (wok.mimas.ac.uk)
  • Choose the Web of Science tab (important!).
  • Selecting the correct set of publications is important. Search for an author by searching for them in the search boxes or by using the Author Finder.
  • When you have a list of target articles displayed click Citation Report on the right (remembering to factor in the health warnings above).
  • Graphs are displayed to show the number of items published per year and the number of citations received per year. The sum of citations, average citations per item and the h-index are displayed on the right.

Instructions for using Scopus to generate an h-index:

  • Login to Scopus
  • Click the Author Search tab at the top of the screen
  • Enter your target author's name (and affiliation if necessary) and click Search to see a list of potential matches
  • Tick the box(es) next to correct matches and click the Show Documents button at the top of the list of search results.
  • You can apply limits if necessary using the options at the top of the screen (e.g. publication year)
  • Select the publications you want to use to generate a citation report either by ticking individual items or using the 'Select All' box, then click the Citation Tracker button.
  • The h-index is shown on the right and a table is generated showing a list of publications, the number of times each one has been cited each year (including the total number of citations on the right).

Highly cited

The Highly Cited.com tool, which is available within Web of Knowledge, provides lists of the most highly cited researchers from around the world. It is a database of "pre-eminent researchers in each of 21 subject categories who have demonstrated great influence in their field as measured by citations to their work." A companion tool, Essential Science Indicators (ESI), includes biographical information and bibliographies of publications with links to the ISI Web of Science database.

Citation trends

The Essential Science Indicators (ESI) tool, is a database that uses journal article publication and citation counts as indicators of the influence and impact of scientific journal articles. It includes rankings for scientists, institutions, countries and journals, plus highly-cited papers over both ten-year and two-year periods and therefore allows for the tracking of current citation trends in research areas. It is delivered as part of the Web of Knowledge.

Access to ESI is available for all UCL staff and students. No login is required from within the UCL network but you will need a UCL account for off-site access. View the ESI online tutorial.

ResearcherID

Authors are strongly encouraged to set up a personal researcherid profile. This will allow you to set up a (free) unique personal identifier which can then be searched within the Web of Science. This allows others to find your papers, regardless of any variations in the use of your name and regardless of your affiliation when a particular paper was published. ResearcherID also helps to uniquely identify individuals with a common surname, a task which is usually problematic. ResearcherID also ensures that papers are correctly attributed to you.

To register & set up your ResearcherID:

  • Go to Web of Knowledge and, from the front page go to the section called Customize your Experience (right-hand menu) and then choose Register.
  • When you have set up an account and logged in, choose My ResearcherID from the toolbar at the top of the screen.
  • Fill in the details as requested to complete your registration.

To link to your ResearcherID profile:

  • Link to your profile using: http://www.researcherid.com/rid/A-0000-0000 (replace A-0000-0000 with your ID)
  • Link to your metrics, using: http://www.researcherid.com/citation/A-0000-000 (replace A0000-0000 with your ID)

NEWS: it is now possible to link your researcherid and your RPS profile; see our researcherid guide. For help setting up a profile, please contact the Library.

How to identify and correct attribution errors

The two main sources to check for attribution errors are: Web of Science and Scopus. If you would like help in fixing errors, please contact the library if you have any problems and need help with this process.

Web of Science

  • Personal attribution: search for your papers in Web of Science (WoS) using your name (e.g. a search for Brunskill K* will find papers authored by Brunskill K and Brunskill KL). Check the Distinct Author Sets link to find out which papers WoS has grouped together as being yours. If you find more than one set of papers that need to be linked to your profile, click the link to 'Improve the accuracy of Distinct Author sets by providing feedback'. 
  • To help people find all of your papers, register for a researcherid account and add your publications to it. It is then possible to search for your unique researcherid and to find all your papers.
  • If any papers have been assigned to you but are not yours, report the errors by using the ‘Suggest a correction’ form.
  • UCL attribution: do a follow-up search for your name and for UCL in the Address field and report any papers that do not come up by using the ‘Suggest a correction’ form.

Scopus

  • Personal attribution: use the Author Search tab to search for your papers. Scopus will have grouped together papers it believes to be yours. If you find more than one set of papers that need to be linked to your profile, click the link to 'Request to merge authors'. You can also use ‘Author Feedback Wizard’ to claim your papers in Scopus.
  • If any papers have been assigned to you but are not yours, report the errors by using ‘Contact us’.
  • UCL attribution: do a follow-up search for your name and for UCL in the Affiliation field and report any papers that do not come up by using ‘Contact us’.

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