Managing your Research profile: Citation Analysis

An Impact Factor is one measure of the relative importance of a journal, individual article, or researcher to literature and research.

Citations to publications, h-index of researchers, and journal impact factors are used to measure the importance and impact of research.

Informed and careful use of the impact data is essential and the following must be kept in mind:

• The number of times a paper is cited is not a measure of its actual quality.
• Some tools that measure the impact data do not incorporate books.
• Certain disciplines have low numbers of journals and usage. One should compare journals or researchers within the same discipline.
• Review articles are cited more often and can change results.
• Self-citing may skew results.

Citation analysis is a way of measuring the relative importance or impact of an author, an article or a publication by counting the number of times that author, article, or publication has been cited by other works.

Why is Citation Analysis important?

Researchers often ask:

What are the best journals in my field?
How do I check who is citing my articles?
How many times have I been cited?"
How do I know this article is important?"
How can I compare the research impact between journals so I know which journal should I publish in?

Citation analysis will provide the answers to the above questions.

Tracking & Improving your research impact

Learn how to use Web of Science, Scopus & Google Scholar to find where & how often your work is cited, what are the 'right' journals in your discipline & what your H-index is.  Learn strategies to improve your research impact, to find your impact in the social media, and how to use alternate sources suitable for your discipline.

Please contact library staff for more information.