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Citations and metrics

Citation searching

When you locate useful articles for your research, their reference lists can provide avenues to extend your research strategy. A useful technique is citation searching which allows you to locate more recent articles which have subsequently cited the original ones.

When undertaking search strategies in the Scopus database, once you have located any relevant article(s), select the View citation overview tab on the toolbar and then on each individual article click onto the title.

Cited Reference searching

Another useful tool in Scopus is the Cited Reference search. This enables you to find newer references based on an older already known reference. If you search for a specific article it will locate subsequent citations, even if it has been incorrectly cited by other authors.

If you select View references you can follow the trail of referenced documents.

Research metrics

Bibliometrics is the quantitative analysis of research publications and citations, and is one of the ways that the academic impact of a journal, article or author can be measured. They should be used with caution however, as metrics can be misused. To learn more, please see the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). The University has committed to meeting the principles of the Declaration. In this context this refers to, “The need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, in funding, appointment, and promotion considerations”.

The University has published a statement of the our commitment to the responsible use of metrics and identifies how we meet the ten principles of the Leiden Manifesto. Research metrics can be used however with careful application.

If you would like to learn more about the different metric tools available and what they do please visit the Metrics toolkit.

If you would like to discuss metrics please contact Liam Bullingham.

Scopus provides various metrics such as SiteScore, which evaluates individual journals. A quick way to assess a journal with metrics is to use the Scimago website.

Google Scholar Metrics tracks citations across a much wider range of documents, including books, working papers, reports and grey literature so citation counts tend to be higher than other products. It ranks publications in research area categories. You can also set up a Google Scholar profile and track the citation of your research outputs.