Research Impact for the Faculties of Arts & ABP - a self-help guide

Publication-level metrics

Journal article citation metrics are demonstrated by the number of times the work has been cited by others. For  Arts,  Architecture, and Landscape Architecture these results may be best found by systematically searching your article's title across numerous databases. For disciplines such as Urban Planning, Property and Construction, citation databases, such as Scopus may suffice.

Preparation tips:

• approach this task systematically, one article title and one database at a time.

• record what you find in a systematic way to ensure you don't repeat yourself 

• develop meaningful folders for managing your data

General search tips:

• Apply exact phrase searching techniques. To search by phrase simply put quotation marks ("...") around the terms you are searching.
• With longer publication titles, keyword searches combined with author names can generate better results.
• Always search full text to capture all possible results.
• Please note citation databases like Google Scholar and Web of Science can sometimes make errors, assigning citing papers incorrectly. Harvesting citations from a number of different databases simultaneously can also cause issues, some of the references may be incomplete, so some manual checking may be required.

Things to consider:

• The more recent the publication, the less citations are likely to be found.
• Many databases that provide citation data do not have comprehensive coverage of the creative arts. Other measures, such as alternative metrics, will need to be considered.
• Research impact measures are not comparable across disciplines.
• No one database will provide a comprehensive measurement of impact.
• The results between citation databases are not comparable since their coverage varies.
• Citation counts alone are not an indication of excellent research. They should be used with other qualitative measures such as esteem.

Databases

Here is a list of multi-disciplinary databases, with basic instructions for obtaining citation counts for your publications.

For more detailed information about each database, select the appropriate tab on the left of this guide.