Research Guides: Measuring Your Scholarly Impact: Journal Rankings & Evaluation (2024)

• Web of Science (Harvard Login)

  A multidisciplinary database, with searchable author abstracts, covering the journal literature of the sciences, social sciences and arts. Create personal account to generate citation reports by author and create citation maps for articles.

• Google Scholar Citations

  Track citations to your publications. Determine which authors are citing to your publications. Graph your citations over time.

  Note: You must register for a Google account using an academic email account. Authors of scholarly articles should claim their Google Scholar page to verify that your publications listings are accurate and complete. You can also create an author profile by following the instructions on the Google Scholar Citation page

• Publish or Perish

  A free author and journal impact metrics software program developed by Anne Wil Harzing that retrieves and analyzes citations to articles and books. The software uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations. The tool can be used to locate most cited articles and books by searching in general citations field.

• ORCID

  Register for an ORCID number. An ORCID is a unique id number that distinguishes you from every other researcher. This id is essential if you have a common last and first name as it distinguishes you from other scholars. Read more about ORCID at the Library's ORCID page. You can also use Harvard ORCID Connect to allow Harvard to access your ORCID more easily. This means internal scholarly and administrative systems can pull in your public ORCID data, saving you time, maintaining the accuracy and consistency of your data, and creating meaningful connections between systems.

  The id can be integrated into the research workflow such as manuscript and grant submissions and it supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities.

Journal metrics are used to identify key journals in a research field. This identification may be most useful to authors who are considering which journals to submit manuscripts to for future publication.

The Impact Factor may be the most familiar metric in academics. Eugene Garfield of Thomson Scientific first introduced this idea in the 1950s. Impact Factor calculations are now available through Thomson’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and the Elsevier product, Scopus.

Despite their merits, journal metrics can be misused for evaluating individual authors. Altmetrics is an alternative for measuring scholarly impact. Altmetrics measures the use of social media tools such as bookmarks, links, blog postings, and tweets to gauge the importance of scholarly output by authors.Using altmetrics as a measure of scholarly impact is controversial as social media tweets and mentions can be gamed by authors.

• Journal Citation Reports (Harvard Login)

  Database for journal evaluation, using citation data drawn from over 8,400 scholarly and technical journals worldwide in the sciences and social sciences. Coverage is both multidisciplinary and international, and incorporates journals from over 3,000 publishers in 60 nations.

• Google Scholar Metrics

  Defaults to top 100 publications in English, ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. Use the search box to search for individual journal titles. Compare the publications that are of interest to you.

  Explore publications by subject area by going to the left column, selecting your language, and picking a general search category. You can refine your results further by clicking on the subcategory link under each general subject category.

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• SJR (Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

  A free ranking tool for journals. Data from Elsevier product, Scopus. You can limit results by country and geographic region.

• SciRev

  Provides information on journal response times and review duration based on feedback from individuals. Heavy focus on science journals but includes some social science and business/economics journals.

The term "altmetrics" (alternative metrics) is used to describe approaches to measure the impact of scholarship by using new social media tools such as bookmarks, links, blog postings, inclusion in citation management tools, mentions and tweets to measurethe importance of scholarly output.

Proponents of altmetrics believe that using altmetrics will help measure the impact of an article in a more comperhensive and objective way than was done with more traditional scholarly impact measures such as journal impact factor. However, there are limits to this approach and caution should be used to not rely on any one particular measure in evaluting the importance of scholarship.

• Altmetrics, A Manifesto

  Web site devoted to altmetrics. Started by group of librarians and researchers who are active in promoting altmetrics as an alternative to more traditional forms of tracking article impact.

• Impact Story

  ImpactStory aggregates altmetrics measures from articles, datasets, blog posts, and more.

• Altmetric (Free Tools)

  Private company that sells access to altmetrics products. Individual researchers can download a free bookmarklet to check altmetrics on individual articles.

• Open Syllabus Project

  Creators of site scraped college Web sites and have put together the metadata for over 1 million syllabi. New metric based on this project, the "Teaching Score" (TS), is a numerical indicator of the frequency with which a particular work is taught.

• Leiden Madtrics

  Leiden Madtrics is the official blog of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University. The blog looks specifically at the processes of evaluating research, developing research policy, and the myriad ways academic research makes an impact in society

• CitNetExplorer

  A product of CWTS of Leiden University, this tool allows citation networks to be imported directly from the Web of Science database and used to visualize and analyze citation networks of scientific publications.

• Gephi

  An open-source software for visualizing and analysing large networks graphs. Gephi uses a 3D render engine to display graphs in real-time and speed up the exploration. You can use it to explore, analyse, spatialise, filter, cluterize, manipulate and export all types of graphs.

• Sci2

  Network visualization tool that allows for easy data import from standard comma-separated lists and generates network analytics as well as visualizations.

• VOSviewer

  Created by Leiden University's CWTS, a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. Offers text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize networks of important terms extracted from a body of scientific literature.

• Local Citation Network

  Construct and visualizes citation networks to identify the most influential papers in a given topic or field.

• Citation Gecko

  Start from a small set of 'seed papers' that define an area you are interested. Gecko will search the citation network for connected papers allowing you to quickly identify important papers that you may have missed.You can connect to your Zotero libraries.

• Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics

• San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment