The ability to assess the impact of research publications is a growing area of importance with applications in securing funding and career development.
Bibliometrics provides a quantitative analysis of the influence of research. It looks at the citation counts for articles to see how they have impacted on the research landscape and with the introduction of altmetrics looks at how the influence of the article can be measured. It stands alongside qualitative measures of excellence such as peer review.
Available metrics include:
Authors and Institutions
Citation counts, publication counts, h-index
Articles
Citation counts, Facebook/Twitter mentions
Journals
Journal impact factor, CiteScore, SCImago journal rank, Eigenfactor
Subjects
Highly-cited papers, hot papers, journal impact factor
This LibGuide highlights some of the tools available to researchers at the University of Hull.
It is worth noting that citation measures are most developed for research in the sciences and social sciences. The arts and humanities, due to disciplinary differences, have less tools available for such analysis. It is also difficult to compare impact factors of journals in different discipline areas as citation practices vary between disciplines.
Impact factors measure how quickly and how often articles in a specific journal are cited by authors of other articles, allowing a comparison of how heavy an impact that journal has within a particular discipline.
To help you get used to metrics, you may wish to undertake the following exercises which use the resources listed in this guide.
Please direct all enquiries to rdm@hull.ac.uk
Key contacts: Kirstyn Radford, Stuart Bentley
Bibliometrics have the following limitations:
