Scholarly Communications

• Article-level metrics have grown in popularity in recent years.
• They are proxies for the influence of individual research studies on their fields and the broader public. 
• Article metrics can datasets from citation-tracking tools such as Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. However, they are also incorporate new datasets to show impact. 
• They are used in hiring, tenure, promotion, evaluation, and grant applications to demonstrate the value of research output. 

Types of Article-Level Metrics

Article-level metrics can be divided into traditional metrics and altmetrics.

Traditional Citation Metrics

• These impact metrics are based on the number of citations to an article in traditional academic research sources, such as peer-reviewed journal articles.
• These are built on the same data sources as author and journal-level metrics, such as in Scopus and Google Scholar.
• The most basic metric is a total citation count. There can be all-time counts or counts over a given date range.
• There are also benchmark metrics, which compares the total citation count to average citation counts for similar articles, such as articles in the same journal or field.

Altmetrics

• While traditional citation metrics look at citations in other academic research, altmetrics look at more expansive ways of measuring impact.
• This might include:
  • Mentions of the article in the news or on web sources like Wikipedia,
  • Shares of the article on social media, and
  • Citations in non-academic sources like policy documents and clinical guidance. 
• Some altmetrics are designed to look at uses that might lead to a traditional academic citation. Examples of this are:
  • How many times an article was downloaded or viewed in on a publisher site or in library databases.
  • How often the article was saved in databases or citation managers.
• There are a number of organizations that seek to measure research impact with altmetrics. Each uses different definitions and datasets. 

• Scopus provides traditional metrics, including benchmark metrics, which they call Scopus Metrics. Metrics available are:
  • Citation Counts: total times a document is cited in the Scopus database.
  • View Counts: a sum of the abstract views in Scopus and clicks on the link to view the full-text at the publisher’s website.
  • Field-Weighted Citation Impact: a ratio of the total citations compared to the expected number of citations based on the average citations in the document's discipline.
  • Citation Benchmarking: a percentile number based on publication year of the document plus three years, comparisons to the same document type, and comparison to the same discipline over the previous 36 months.
• Scopus also uses Elsevier's PlumX Metrics to provide altmetrics. PlumX looks at:
  • Citation Metrics: counts in a much wider range of data sources than Scopus, including things like patents, clinical guidelines, and policy documents.
  • Usage Metrics: abstract views, downloads, full-text views, and views in Mendeley.
  • Capture Metrics: readers and saves in Mendeley and SSRN.
  • Mention Metrics: references to a source in blogs, news sources, and Wikipedia.
  • Social Media Metrics: information from Facebook and SSRN.

• Google Scholar only will provide total citations to an article, though they can be limited by date. They do not provide any benchmark metrics.
• However, Google Scholar looks at a wider pool of citable sources than Scopus does, allowing you to identify more citations. 
• To find the citations, search for your article or scroll to your publications in your author profile. 
  • In the search results, the citations numbers will be provided in the "Cited by #" link at the bottom of the result. You can click the link to see the list of citations. 
    
  • On the author page, there is a column to the right of the article title in the column Cited By with a total number of citations. That number is also a link, and you can click it to see the list of citations. 
    
• On the page of citations, you can adjust the date range in the left column. This will give you total citations for that date range.
  

Altmetric

• Altmetric tracks a variety of data sources including public policy documents, the mainstream media, patents, post-publication review platforms like PubPeer, Wikipedia, the Open Syllabus Project, social media, and multimedia sites. 
• Altmetric is integrated into a number of publisher's sites, including Wiley, Springer, and Taylor & Francis. 
• Altmetric also provides a browser bookmarklet for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that lets you check their metrics when you are looking at an article online, as long as it can identify the DOI. 

Paperbuzz

• Paperbuzz in an open source altmetrics tool from OurResearch. 
• Papperbuzz draws on DOI provide CrossRef's data sources, which include patent citations, social mentions on Twitter and Reddit, links on blogs and Wikipedia, and more. 
• Search Paperbuzz with an article's DOI. Data on articles from before 2017 are incomplete.