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Citation Metrics and Scholarly Profiles Guide Ask Us

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Getting Started

Getting Started

This guide is designed to assist faculty members with the quantitative aspects of scholarly publishing, known as bibliometrics. Publishing metrics are removed from the intellectual exercise of scholarly productivity, and yet they are increasingly important as measures used to gauge the weight of publications (usually journal articles). They are commonly a factor in evaluation for promotion, tenure, and research funding.

Quantitative research evaluation is common practice in the sciences and engineering, where journal articles are more frequently used for scholarly communication. In the social sciences and humanities, this kind of bibliometric analysis is more complicated. However, most scholars are interested in selecting venues for their scholarly communication carefully, and in ensuring that their published works are noted and included in any bibliometric analysis.

UNB Libraries can assist you with both of these goals, providing information on the various measures of journal impact factors (Scopus’ Journal Metrics, etc.), and how to use proprietary and open (ResearcherID, Google Scholar) software to ensure that your publications are included in any h-index or other calculation of scholarly impact.

Finally, this site includes information that will help you to identify good and not-so-good venues for publishing your work, using resources like UlrichsWeb, and a handy glossary of terms, to demystify bibliometrics.

If you want to:

  • Learn which library-subscribed and freely-accessible resources include bibliometric information, use the Article Metrics tab.
  • Find out how various journals are ranked, and what methods are used to assign relative, quantitative measures to individual titles, use the Journal Metrics tab.
  • Ensure that your own publications are correctly attributed to you and that your profile as a researcher describes you accurately, use the databases listed under the Author Metrics tab. 
  • Read up on how bibliometrics are used to analyse scholarly publishing in various disciplines and using various methods, follow the links to reading lists under the Further Readings tab.
  • Unravel the language of bibliometrics, see the brief glossary under the Terms and Definitions tab.

Subject Specialties:
open access, digital publishing/scholarship, open scholarly infrastructure, persistent identifiers, scholarly profiles, research data management


Last modified on March 19, 2024 07:20