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Measuring Your Impact: Journal Rankings, Citation Analysis, and Other Metrics

Tools and methods for measuring the impact of an individual or their scholarshipp

Citation Analysis

Google Scholar Citations provides citation counts for articles found within Google Scholar (see information on how Google obtains its content). Follow the prompts to set up your profile. 

Google describes this tool as "a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name."

Journal Rankings

Google Scholar Metrics provides five-year h-index and h-median metrics for journals included in the Google Scholar index.

The intent is to "provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics summarize recent citations to many publications, to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research."

You can browse the top 100 publications, ordered by (to see which articles in a publication were cited the most and who cited them, click on its h-index number to view the articles as well as the citations underlying the metrics).

You can also explore publications in a particular research area -- click on Categories and then narrow by subcategory.

Journal title search is not available.

Google Books

Google Books can be used to find citations within books to articles in journals. This is unusual among citation tools and may very usefully supplement counts of article citations that appear in other articles, particularly for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.  

Use the “Advanced Book Search” and enter the full title of the article in “with the exact phrase.” Across from “Search” keep the default at “all books.” Change the default of “Content” to “books” only. 

Limitations

  • It may undercount by not finding citations in books that are in-copyright, because the full-text of these books is not accessible in the database. In addition to making available for free viewing the the full-text of out-of-copyright books from over 20 major research libraries, Google Books also provides partial text of in-copyright books. It is not clear how (or if) the citations in all scanned books are being counted or counted correctly.
  • Results include citations within ephemera and other material.

Concerns