Demonstrating Author Impact
This section of the guide discusses various ways of demonstrating author impact:
- Author Metrics: Citation counts, h-index
- Article level Metrics : Usage counts and altmetrics
- Citation Benchmarking, i.e. article performance against citation baseline (Web of Science, Scopus)
- Field-weighted Citation Impact (Scopus)
Citation Counts
Citation counts measure the impact of a particular publication or an individual author by counting the number of times either has been cited in other works. This analysis of a particular author's work is one of the components used to evaluate the quality of that's individual's scholarly output and the impact he or she is having upon a particular discipline. Although such counting sounds relatively straightforward, it is complicated by the fact that there is no single citation analysis source that covers all publications and their cited references.
There are a number of ways to measure this:
- Citation count: The total number of times an author's work has been cited
- Average citation rate: the ratio of total citations to the number of works authored
- The h-index: A researcher's h-index is determined by listing their publications in descending order of times cited and counting down the list to the last paper for which the number of times cited exceeds the number of papers counted. Rather than a measure of the average number of citations, which can be skewed by either a single highly-cited article or by new articles which have not yet been cited, the h-index is believed to provide a measurement that avoids over-emphasizing these extreme cases.
Citation analysis as a qualitative measurement should be used cautiously, for the following reasons:
- Citation rates and practices vary widely between disciplines. Citation analysis of scholars in one field should not be compared to those in another.
- Where a scholar publishes can have a great impact on the analysis if the tools used to count citations do not index the publications where a scholarly work is cited. This is particularly true for researchers that publish in international journals, smaller regional or local publications, or in books and other non-journal publications.
- Citation rates can be influenced by other practices such as self-citation.
The three key sources for citation information are:
Seminal & Highly Cited Research
One indication that a particular source may be considered Seminal Research (i.e., of great importance or lasting influence; seminal works are sometimes also referred to as landmark works, classic works, or pivotal works) is that the article has been cited in many other publications. Highly Cited Research is a term used in Web of Science and refers to the top 1% of cited research per year in their database. Citation counts can include research that pointed to an article in support of their research but also counts times a research pointed to problems in an article's study or results. Note though, that although all seminal articles will be highly cited, not all highly cited articles are necessarily seminal. In order for a work to be considered seminal, it should have led to:
- a much higher level of understanding in the field, or
- a paradigm shift, or
- an entirely new research area
In the field of management, for example, Michael E. Porter's 1996 article entitled "What is Strategy?" is considered a seminal work since it provided a clear and widely accepted definition of "strategy" and discounted many alternate views of what strategy is. The article has been cited thousands of times and has influenced business leaders around the world. (UMUC-HighlyCited)
Alkek Library also has a "Landmark Papers in..." series. Some disciplines also have awards for an author's contribution to the field, like Turing and SIGCOMM.
Examples of seminal works in education include work that came from major theorists like Vygotsky and Piaget.
Also, don't underestimate a search of a topic or discipline + seminal, seminal research, seminal works, landmark works, classic works, or pivotal works -- seminal works "special education"
Sage Navigator search results are based on Sage Major Works. A unique feature of Sage Navigator is the Chronology Tool. After you run your search and open an entry in the search results, click the Key Readings next to the pink Overview tab.
Web of Science (composed of: Arts & Humanities Citation Index 1975-, Social Sciences Citation Index 1900-, and Science Citation Index 1899-) is the original citation research source. Web of Science extracts the citation information from the articles in more than 10,000 journals from almost every discipline.
Be aware that a citation search in the Web of Science will only count citations from sources indexed by Web of Science and will not reference citations from books, dissertations or theses, patents, and technical reports not included in the database. This being the case, disciplines that publish heavily in the journal literature (such as the Sciences) are better represented here than those that do not (Business, for example). The Sciences are also represented much more in Web of Science than Arts & Humanities and the Social Sciences.
____________________________
When you know an author who is especially relevant to a field of study, you may begin by searching their name on the Author line of the Cited Reference Search screen. To do a Cited Author, search the Last Name and First character of name followed by an asterisk * The recommended format shows in the search box to the right of the Cited Author pull-down.
David C. Caverly would be searched as: CAVERLY D*
Hyphenated names or names containing an apostrophe or a space should be searched both with and without the punctuation:
Jovita Ross-Gordon would be searched as ROSS-GORDON J*
A Documents search in Web of Science allows for a Topic keyword search and search results will default to sort citations by Times Cited. Also, by creating a Web of Science Sign In account, you can set up Searches and Alerts.
Highly Cited Papers are papers published in the last 10 years that are receiving the most citations (top 1%) when compared to peer papers (same field, same publication year).
Citation Benchmarking
Scopus and Web of Science offer tools for article benchmarking. Citation benchmarking indicates how citations received by the document being viewed compare with the average for similar documents.
Scopus citation benchmarking takes into account the date of publication, the document type, and the disciplines associated with the item. Citation Benchmarking compares documents within an 18 month window and is computed separately for each of its sources' disciplines.
In Web of Science, there are a few more steps to obtaining the baseline information. In the top navigation, look for Essential Science Indicators. Once in it, navigate to Field Baselines and Percentiles. Baselines are annualized expected citation rates for papers in a research field. Percentiles indicate how many citations it will take for a paper to be in the top 1%, 10%, 20%, 50% of papers in that field that year. For example, a 2017 material science article that received 18 citations would put that paper among the top 10% of papers published that year.
More information about Web of Science tools for author benchmarking can be found in Authors / Researchers: What is your impact? guide by Clarivate Analytics. Please note that the University Libraries does not currently have a subscription to the InCites section of Web of Science.
Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) in Scopus
The FWCI score in Scopus indicates how the article's citation count compares to similar articles in the same field and timeframe.
A score of 1.00 is the "global average" and means the article is cited at an average level. Articles with a FWCI greater than 1.00 are performing better than global average. A FWCI below 1.00 suggests the article may be underperforming.
Important To Know
Because the FWCI comes from Scopus, only documents within the database (1996 to the present) will have a FWCI.
Because the FWCI includes field normalization, theoretically, the score should be a better indicator of performance than a raw citation count.
How to Find the FWCI
Locate the article in Scopus and go to its full record (Document Details). The FWCI is displayed within the Metrics area:
Article-Level Metrics
Along with citation data, many databases now display usage data for articles.The count reflects the number of times a user of that database has accessed the full text of or saved the article
For example, Web of Science displays usage for "Last 180 Days" and "Since 2013":
Scopus displays a variety of metrics in addition to citation data: usage in EBSCO databases, captures on sites such as CiteULike or Mendeley, as well as Wikipedia / social media references. These additional metrics are typically referred to as altmetrics or alternative metrics. Besides Scopus, PlumX Metrics are available on these platforms: EBSCOHost databases, EBSCO Discovery Service, ScienceDirect, Engineering Village.
