This page explains some common research metrics and considerations when using them. Understanding these can help you focus your research visibility efforts and ensure you use your time effectively.
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Being able to measure your research visibility and the effectiveness of what you're doing to increase it is important to help you use your time effectively.
There are many metrics out there, citations being a commonly used one. However, it's important to remember that one metric will only show a fraction of the bigger picture. Focusing on just one or two metrics can give a distorted representation of what's happening and lead to discrimination and systemic biases against researchers. As such, we recommend that you use a variety of metrics to assess how things are going, and encourage others to do the same.
The three that our guides look at are:
There are many more out there, each ranging in utility and purpose. For example, most social media platforms can provide data on your activity. The main thing is to find the ones that work for what you're looking to achieve - there's no point measuring citations if you're trying to get social media engagement!
This video gives a quick introduction to research metrics as well as providing some considerations for using them effectively and ethically.
Citations are a count of how many other pieces of published research have referenced your work in theirs. They are often used as a measure of research visibility, impact, and performance.
Citations are frequently used in league tables, funding applications, and recruitment processes. When used ethically, they should be one of multiple measures of quality or achievement rather than the sole measure.
It's important to remember that citation counts can often be limited to the platform providing the data. For example, both Scopus and Google Scholar provide citation data, but the numbers they provide only look at the publications indexed within their own databases. This means that not all citations for a publications may be counted by a single platform and the number may be different on one platform compared to the other.
The University of Essex subscribes to Scopus and SciVal, two tools that can help you get an overview of citations. This can be on the researcher, institution, or country-level (and many variations in-between). If you would like more guidance on how to use these tools, please get in touch.
The below video introduces citations in more depth, including explaining the limitations and strengths of using citation analysis.
Citations are created automatically when you reference another work in yours. Providing complete and correct reference information is important to ensure platforms can accurately detect citations and count them. They most commonly use author names, publication titles, and DOIs for this purpose.
All resources (e.g. data, articles, books, conference papers, websites etc.) created by someone else that you use in your work should be cited. Your department, publisher, or journal may require you to use a specific referencing style for citations. To learn more about how to cite correctly and for guides on using the different referencing styles, please visit our referencing pages.
Citations are created automatically when you are referenced in another person's work. They need to provide complete and correct reference information to ensure platforms can accurately detect citations and count them. They most commonly use author names, publication titles, and DOIs for this purpose.
Most commonly, there may be variations in your author name, "J. Bloggs" vs "Joe Bloggs" vs "Joseph Bloggs". This may mean that databases like Google Scholar or Scopus may not know to connect these variants to you. Most platforms allow you to manually connect publications, provide aliases to help automated connections, or both. Using an ORCID eliminates most of these issues as you will be recognised by your unique ID number. See our online profile guidance for more information on setting up and maintaining your ORCID and other profiles.
There is an element of luck when it comes to being cited in the first place, but by following our guidance on increasing your visibility and building your reputation as an expert in your field, you are much more likely to be cited.
Citations only provide information about how other academic publications have mentioned a work and often with many limitations on how those connections are drawn. As such, avoid using them as the only measurement of engagement, impact, or visibility - combine them with other metrics and qualitative measures to provide a more complete picture.
Due to the importance that is often places on citations, there are a number of unethical practices that have emerged to try and "game" citation counts. Citation cartels and citation stacking are ways editors, researchers, and journals game the system in the attempt to inflate their citations and so make it look like they have a larger academic impact. Being involved with a citation cartel or engaging with citation stacking can be extremely damaging for your credibility as a researcher and can have severe consequences, such as being barred from publishing in certain journals.
Use the buttons below to find out more about Citation Stacking and Cartels:
Citation stacking is when academics cite themselves to get more citations or when a journal asks academics who submit their manuscripts to add references that are from the same journal to increase the citations to the journal. However, this is now very easy to discover, and so citation cartels have emerged.
Citation cartels are groups of people or journals (usually editors of the journals) who agree to cite each other in order to boost the impact factor of the journal. Journals usually do this during the peer-review process by suggesting that academics add a lot of references to their manuscripts that are from two or three other journals – these journals will then return the favour.
If someone asks you to cite irrelevant research in your work, please get in touch for advice.
Despite the prevalence of citations, they are just one way of measuring your research visibility and impact.
Altmetric provides a series of metrics that measure how many times your work has been used in non-academic settings, for example in the news, blogs, or on social media. This can be useful to see where your engagement efforts are working, perhaps without you even realising, and so where it would be efficient to allocate your time.
Altmetric can also give a more representative picture* than citations alone since how people are talking about your work may better demonstrate how they are actually using it compared to how other academics are citing it. The information is also typically available faster than citations as you do not need to wait for the academic publication process before seeing who's talking about your work.
* Note: Altmetric uses the DOI to track your work, so ensure that it is included whenever you share it (e.g. on social media, in the news, or on blogs). Additionally, they do not track every platform. Further demonstration of why using a single metric/provider, will not give the full picture!
Note: Altmetric uses the DOI to track your work, so ensure that it is included whenever you share it (e.g. on social media, in the news, or on blogs).
Altmetric provides a free tool that you can use on article pages with a DOI to show you the Altmetric Score for that article. If you have an ORCID and it's up to date, you can quickly go to each of your publications using their DOIs and check them in turn with the Altmetric tool.
You can then click through to the Altmetric page for that article. This page displays a summary of the article information, a graph of mentions over time, and tabs with more information about mentions.
Each tab next to the Summary tab will show you the mentions of that type and allow you to go to that mention on that platform. This can be a great way to not only see where your work is being talked about but also jump straight to it so you can either join the conversation, contact the authors, or reshare their mention to amplify the attention further. It also shows the citations count from Dimensions.
Using the graph on the Summary tab, you can see when there has been engagement with the article. This can help you to see patterns such as what was going on that may have led to increased engagement. You can also see the impact of things you may be doing. For example, if you started posting more regularly after a particular date or tried a new style of content, you can see how things have changed.
Each tab next to the graph Timeline view will give you more context to the mentions, for example showing you where the mentions came from in the world, breaking down the audience, or explaining how the article is performing in comparison to others. Again, this can be useful for understanding your audience and where to put your efforts. For example, if it's particularly popular in a certain country or career stage, tailor what you're doing to maximise that, or alternatively adjust to broaden your appeal.
Altmetric has further guidance on how to interpret the Altmetric Donut and other data they provide as well as some tips for using the information to improve your visibility effectively.
You can use Overton for tracking and evidencing policy impact. Overton is the world’s largest searchable policy database, which tracks everything from white papers to think tank policy briefs to national clinical guidelines, and automatically finds the references to your scholarly research, academics and other outputs.
It looks for the names of any researchers on expert panels, who are quoted in policy documents, who give evidence to committee hearings and more. Importantly it can also find the links between policy documents – often research is picked up by intermediaries like think tanks and agencies – giving you unparalleled insight into the dynamics of policymaking.
Overton is used by researchers to study the dynamics of real world policymaking and also to track the impact of their own work on policy.
You can find more information about using Overton from the Research and Enterprise Office, including how to set up an account and further training and support.
Bibliometrics is the term used when talking about measuring academic impact (citations). Several databases offer tools to analyse citations, however most of these are subscription based. Google Scholar is a free tool, but the information is limited and you have to create a researcher profile in order to access information about your citations.
The Metrics Tookit provides information about lots of different metrics that can be used to demonstrate and evaluate research impact. Take a look to go beyond what we've highlighted in our guide.
Except where otherwise noted, this work by University of Essex Library and Cultural Services is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.
