Library Guides: Research impact for Education: a self-help guide: Publication metrics

Data sources - publication metrics

There are multiple sources of metrics to demonstrate impact of research outputs. This guide provides researchers with general guidance on a range of sources. The key data sources and critical metrics differs from discipline to discipline. To help you evaluate which tools and metrics are available to build your specific case, use the Metrics Toolkit.

Data sources for publication metrics
Web of Science	Web of Science (owned by Clarivate Analytics) Core Collection provides access to authoritative, multidisciplinary content in over 12,000 journals including Open Access and conference proceedings. Pick from these metrics to demonstrate the scholarly impact/relevance of publications: Citation counts Highly Cited papers Hot papers
Scopus	Scopus (owned by Elsevier) provides access to over 23700 peer-reviewed journals (including Open Access journals), 166000 books and conference papers in the Health Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences. Pick from these metrics to demonstrate the scholarly impact/relevance of publications: Citations Field-weighted citation impact; citation benchmarking PlumX metrics Citescore; SJR; SNIP
Google Scholar	Google Scholar searches across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Pick from these metrics to demonstrate the scholarly impact/relevance of publications: Citations
Minerva Elements	Minerva Elements (owned by Digital Science) is the University of Melbourne’s Publication Management System. Harvested metrics from CrossRef, Scopus, and Web of Science included: Citation count - Web of Science Citation count - Scopus Altmetric score - Altmetric Explorer for Institutions SNIP Journal Indicator SJR Journal Indicator
Minerva Access	Minerva Access is the University of Melbourne’s Institutional Repository. It aims to collect, preserve and showcase the intellectual output of staff and students of the University of Melbourne for a global audience. Pick from these metrics to demonstrate the scholarly impact/relevance of publications: Usage statistics for each item in the repository Foot of relevant pages – see data on number of views Number of PDF downloads Displayed by month or by year
Altmetric Explorer for Institutions	Altmetric (owned by Digital Science) captures mentions of scholarly output in tweets, blog posts, news stories and other content. You can monitor, search and measure conversations about your publications and compare them against the work of similar academics or in similar fields of research.
PlumX	Similar to Altmetric, PlumX (commercial, owned by Elsevier) metrics provide insights into the ways people interact with research outputs. Data is integrated into the results from EBSCO databases and Scopus search results and some publisher inferfaces. Quick tip: Try adding a DOI to https://plu.mx/a/?doi= to see a free, limited set of alt-metrics about a paper from Plum Analytics.
ERIC	ERIC provides coverage of journal articles, conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, books and monographs. It helps with finding additional citation counts for publications perhaps not covered in Web of Science or Scopus. ERIC (Proquest) provides cited by counts and ERIC (Ebscohost) integrated PlumX data.