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Scholarly Metrics: Home

This guide will help faculty trace the impact of their articles as well as the impact of journals by title.

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"What's Going On, 2009" by Willie Rodger; Bridgeman Education, WVU Libraries

Acknowledgement

Thank you,

Mark Cyzyk, Robin Sinn, and Yuan Zeng

The Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University

for allowing me to use your LibGuide as a template.

Caveat emptor

In this guide there are tools that let you:

  • count articles that cite your articles
  • create an h-index
  • manage your research identity

The numbers that are generated are not absolutes. They should be used in conjunction with other qualitative measures.

Citation tracking, or citation analysis

is an important tool used to trace scholarly research, measure impact, and inform tenure and funding decisions. The impact of an article is evaluated by counting the number of times other authors cite it in their work. Researchers do citation analysis for several reason:

  • find out how much impact a particular article has had, by showing which other authors have cited the article in their own paper
  • find out how much impact a particular author has had by looking at the frequency and number of his/her total citations
  • discover more about the development of a field or topic
    • by reading the papers that cite a seminal work in that area
    • by noting peak time periods for citations
    • by noting specific institution doing work in this area

The output from citation studies is often the only way that non-specialists in governments and funding agencies, or even those indifferent scientific disciplines, can judge the importance of a piece of scientific research.

Get Help from the Science Librarian

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Jonah McAllister-Erickson
He, Him, His, They, Them
Contact:
WVU Downtown Campus Library
1549 University Ave.
Morgantown, WV 26506

Office 1004A
304-293-0334