Workshop: Citation Counts and Journal Impact Factors for Tenure and Promotion
Vocabulary of Citation Counts and Journal Impact Factors
Vocabulary for Citation Counts and Journal Impact Factors
What are citation counts?
Broadly speaking, "citation counts" is ta term that describes the measurable times others refer to your work, typically in the format of a citation.
What is a journal impact factor?
Journal impact factor is a method of measuring the impact of all content of a journal and is a way to rank the impact of that journal on a discipline.
More terms
- Altmetrics
- Non-traditional measure of bibliometrics (social media, scholarly networks, etc...)
- This is starting to appear in LibrarySearch and other sources.
- Eigenfactor Score: measures the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in Journal Citation Reports. It measures citations after removing self cites and other factors.
- H-index:
- number of your papers (h) that have been cited at least h times over x many years.
- At least h many papers have been cited h many times.
- For example, an author or journal with an h-index of 30 has written at least 30 papers that have each had at least 30 citations. Thus, a higher h-index indicates more publications that have been cited more often. This metric is useful because it takes into account the uneven weight of highly cited papers or papers that have not yet been cited.
- number of your papers (h) that have been cited at least h times over x many years.
- i-10 index measures the number of articles that have been cited at least 10 times.
- For example, an i-10 index of 30 would mean that at least 30 journal articles had been cited 10 times.
- Self-citing: frowned upon, inflates cite counts.
Who measures citation counts?
Gathering citation information involves a variety of sources and tools
No database is likely to be able to cover all outputs in all subjects. Bear this in mind when using citation data from different sources. These are competing services, and what and how they measure is not consistent across databases.
Who measures citations?
Google Scholar
- Searches publisher websites, repositories, university websites, book platforms, technical reports, patent sites and other sources.
- May contain duplicate entries and “minor” works like conference
- posters/presentations and undergraduate thesis.
- Very strong in foreign journals and books.
Google Books
Google Journal Rank
Scopus
Scopus
- Over 36,000 journals from 5,000+ publishers.
- Stronger international coverage than Web of Science
