Research Guides: Research Help: Getting Started: Scholarly Impact

Background

Scholarly impact factors (bibliometrics) provide information on the perceived importance of a journal article or journal title itself, based on how many times others have cited, read, or commented on these sources. Evaluating scholarly impact can be useful in the tenure process, as well as a means to find additional articles on a given topic.

For additional information on bibliometric measures, please see the following articles:

Kear, R., & Colbert-Lewis, D. (2011). Citation searching and bibliometric measures: Resources for ranking and tracking. College & Research Libraries News, 72(8), 470-474. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.72.8.8620
Roemer, R., & Borchardt, R. (2012). From bibliometrics to altmetrics: A changing scholarly landscape. College & Research Libraries News, 73(10), 596-600. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.73.10.8846

* Tip: For best results, examine multiple scholarly impact factors. *

Determining scholarly impact using free online sources

Altmetric
Almetrics explores the impact of links, bookmarks, online conversations, and more.
Eigenfactor
Carl Bergstrom and his colleagues at the University of Washington developed the Eigenfactor score. The Eigenfactor score represents the top 1,000 journals and uses data from Thomas Reuters' Journal Citations Reports to measure how frequently journal articles from the last five years have been cited.
Impact Story
Impact Story is useful for measuring the scholarly impact made via open access sources, such as Public Library of Science (PLoS), as well as social media.
PLOS Article Level Metrics
Measures scholarly impact of article in the open access Public Library of Science (PLoS) and social media buzz. Articles are also ranked individually by comments.
SCImago Journal and Country Rank
Using Scopus data, this site offers two (2) metrics:
1. SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
2. Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)

Sorting the wheat from the chaff

When it comes to online Open Access journals, there are reputable ones and not so reputable ones. To determine the difference, use the sites below.

Open Access Scholarly Publisher's Association (OASPA)
Take a look at the "Information Resources" tab for reputable publications.

Determining scholarly impact using Google

From the results page in Google Scholar, click on "Cited by" to see other publications that cite a particular article.
Track citations and set-up alerts in Google Scholar.
Use Google Metrics to view the top publications in various fields.