Citation searching and bibliometric measures: Resources for ranking and tracking

Abstract

A professor asks you, "Who is citing my articles?How many times have I been cited?What is my h-index score?"A student asks you, "How do I know if this article is important?"Another professor asks you, "Which journal should I publish in for my tenure?"A different student asks you, "What are the best journals in the field of Anthropology?"T he avenues to evaluate citation track- ing and journal ranking have greatly increased in the past six years.Bibliometrics, the application of mathematical and statistical analysis to books, journals, and other publications, 1 allows us to choose journal collections, assist with applications for research funding, evaluate journal status, and find significant contributors in a subject area.Most importantly, the expertise librarians have in this area can be used to help our faculty prove their scholarly contribution and achieve success in their tenure process.Any aggregator of citations could create its own bibliometric measures if they are willing to invest the time and expense.Elsevier and Thomson Reuters are the major players in creating citation and journal measures.Each vendor primarily uses its own unique data, journals, publications, authority files, indexes, and subject categories.Both companies have given their data to research labs to create new metrics that are freely available online from the labs and are also included in the company's products for subscribers.One metric, the h-index, is vendor neutral but there is no overarching tool that exists across vendors.The bibliometrics field is an exciting one to watch and continues to produce beautiful data visualization projects.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.