Research metrics
Research metrics are indicators used to measure the impact, visibility, and quality of research outputs. These metrics help assess the influence and significance of research within the academic community and beyond. In this page, we have shared some commonly used research metrics and methods to measure research impact.
If you need to measure your research impact for grant applications, professional promotion or improving your research profile, please contact the Library. We could help with generating your research metrics indicators and interpreting the data to show your research best story.
Author level metrics indicators: Citations are a fundamental metric used to measure research impact. They indicate the number of times a research paper has been cited by other authors. The H index is a common tool used by authors to quantify their individual impact. It represents the relationship between the number of papers an author has published and the number of times the author has been cited.
Journal metrics indicators
Journal Impact Factor (JIF): The JIF measures the average number of citations received by articles published in a specific journal. It provides an indication of the journal's prestige and influence within a particular field. JIFs are typically calculated annually and can be found in the Journal Citation Reports database.
CiteScore helps to measure journal citation impact. Free, comprehensive, transparent and current metrics calculated using data from Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.
SJR or SCImago Journal Rank, is based on the concept of a transfer of prestige between journals via their citation links. SJR Measures the prestige of citations received by a journal and field-normalizes them. The methodology is similar to that of Google PageRank. The average SJR value for all journals in Scopus is 1.000.
SNIP or Source Normalized Impact per Paper, is a sophisticated metric that accounts for field-specific differences in citation practices. SNIP is a ratio between the “Raw Impact per Paper” compared to the expected Citations per Publication, of that journal’s field. It’s a field-normalized metric. The average SNIP value for all journals in Scopus is 1.000.
Article metrics indicators
Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) Field-Weighted Citation Impact in SciVal indicates how the number of citations received by an entity’s publications compares with the average number of citations received by all other similar publications in the data universe: how do the citations received by this entity’s publications compare with the world average?
Citation Count Citation Count in SciVal indicates the total citation impact of an entity: how many citations have this entity’s publications received?
Journal metrics
Journal level metrics continue to be an important part of the basket of metrics, complementing new and alternative metrics to provide a multi-faceted view of a journal’s impact. On Scopus, you will find an evolving and expanding suite of journal metrics that go beyond just journals to include most serial titles, including supplements, special issues and conference proceedings. Freely available on Scopus you will find CiteScore metrics, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP).
Article-level metrics
PlumX Metrics is now the primary source of article-level metrics in the Research Intelligence portfolio alongside the Citation Count (including percentile benchmarking) and Field-Weighted Citation Impact. PlumX Metrics provide insights into the ways people interact with individual pieces of research output (articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and many more) in the online environment. Examples include when research is mentioned in the news or is tweeted about. Collectively known as PlumX Metrics, these metrics are divided into five categories- Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media, and Citations- to help make sense of the huge number of metrics available and to enable analysis through comparing ‘like with like’. PlumX gathers and brings together appropriate research metrics for all types of scholarly research output.
Author and institutional metrics
Author and institutional metrics can help you assess an entity’s research output and scholarly impact. The depth and breadth of content on Scopus, combined with industry-leading technology powering algorithmic and systematic author and institutional entity disambiguation, provides the quality data needed to build accurate measurements of impact. With Scopus you can easily analyze and track an individual or institution’s publication history.
