Bibliometrics

Assessing your citation impact

Citation alerts

Improving your citation impact - where to publish

Improving your citation impact - open access

Improving your citation impact - changes and corrections

Improving your citation impact - housekeeping

 Assessing your citation impact

There are two major multidisciplinary citation databases for the counting and aggregating of citations; these are the Web of Science and Scopus. Both allow users to count the number of times they have been cited, to see their h-index and how many of their publications have been cited. A little less formal, and to be used with some care, is Google Scholar, which counts and aggregates citations across a broad range of disciplines and subject areas.

Guides to using the Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. 

 Citation alerts

You can be alerted when someone cites your work, your colleagues and others in your field. All three providers Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar allow you to do this.

 Improving your citation impact - where to publish

Journal rankings can help in deciding where to publish your work and to help maximise your citation impact. The Journal Citation Reports published through the Web of Knowledge rank the impact of journals in the sciences and social sciences, but not generally in the arts and humanities. The SCImago Journal and Country Rank ranks the journals found in Scopus, and include many from the arts and humanities. Both ranking tools also have a range of other metrics which allow users to assess other factors.

 Improving your citation impact - Open Access

Making your work open access can help improve its visibility, the number of times it is downloaded and its citation impact. The University of Surrey helps you to achieve this via Surrey Research Insight. 

 Improving your citation impact - changes and corrections

Occasionally errors may appear in citation databases and these can cause mis-citation within the database and could lead others to mis-cite your work as well. Both the Web of Science and Scopus invite users to correct their entries to their author profiles and article data. Google Scholar asks that you contact the owner of the data source over which it 'crawls', to make the necessary corrections to their original records. 

For the Web of Science you can use their Data Change & Missing Article/Journal Issue Request to request changes or likewise through Intellectual Property & Science to make similar requests.

There are various links in Scopus where you can correct your author profile and records. Use the Author Feedback Wizard in Scopus to help assign any of your name variants correctly. You can Request Author Detail Corrections or Request to Merge Authors whilst conducting author searches. You can contact them by email for author profile and general corrections.

 Improving your citation impact - housekeeping

Be consistent in how you give your initials, forenames and surname. If you change your name you can request to merge author names in Scopus as noted above. Similarly in the Web of Science if you register for its ResearcherID you can manage your publications and citation profile.

Check the final proofs of your work particularly that bibliographic data is correct. Notably this should ensure your name and affiliation are correctly given. For example, the University name should be given as - University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, Surrey, England.

To minimise the possibility of being mis-cited, check that you reference yourself and colleagues correctly in the publication's referencing style.