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 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 more sources that track citation impacts
  • Visit Altmetric.org for more help.
• Eigenfactor Score: 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. 
• CiteScore (Scopus): the number of citations received by a journal in one year, to documents published in three previous years, divided by the number of documents indexed in Scopus published in those same three 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. 
• Immediacy index
  • in WoS Incites:  "The journal Immediacy Index indicates how quickly articles in a journal are cited."
• Self-citing: frowned upon, inflates cite counts. 

​Google Journal Citation Information 

Google Scholar ranks journals by impact factor. You can search by 

• Top 100 Google Journals

• By Discipline. For example, you can search by broad category with the drop down menu from the link above: You can further refine by subcategory

.