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Engineering Research: Bibliometrics

This guide aims to familiarize new Engineering postgraduate students with different resources and services of the Library.

Introduction

OECD Glossary of Statistical Terms

Bibliometrics is a statistical analysis of books, articles, or other publications.

Originally, work was limited to collecting data on numbers of scientific articles and publications, classified by authors and/or by institutions, fields of science, country, etc., in order to construct simple productivity indicators for academic research.

Subsequently, more sophisticated and multidimensional techniques based on citations in articles (and more recently also in patents) were developed.

The resulting citation indexes and co-citation analyses are used both to obtain-more sensitive measures of research quality and to trace the development of fields of science and of networks.

Some well-known metrics include citation counts, Eigenfactor score, h-index and impact factor are listed in the following section.

Visit our Research Impact guide  to learn more about bibliometrics.


References

  1. White Paper: Using Bibliometrics
  2. OECD Frascati Manual, Sixth edition, 2002, Annex 7, paras, 20-22, page 203. Retrieved from https://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=198.

 

Metrics

Citation Counts

How many times an article has been cited by others. Using Web of Science or Scopus, it is also possible to find out the total citation counts of an author or organization.

To find citation counts, you can use:

WOS - citation count

GS - citation count


Eigenfactor Score

Published by Eigenfactor.org, it is used to measure the journal's total importance to the scholarly community. Journals have higher impact have larger Eigenfactor scores.

Eigenfactor


H-Index (aka Hirsch Index)

Introduced by Jorge E. Hirsch, h-index is used to measure both the productivity and impact of the work of a scholar. An h-index of 15 means that at least 25 papers of the author have 15 citations or more. Citation analytical tools such as Web of Science and Scopus can be used to find H-index.

H-index on WOS


Impact Factor (IF)

Impact Factor is one of the commonly used quantitative tools for "ranking, evaluating, categorizing, and comparing journals". It is defined as the average number of times articles from a journal have been cited in the most two recent years. While journals with high impact factors deemed to be more important that those with lower number, certain subject disciplines have low numbers of citations and usage, so one should only compare journals within the same subject category. Also, impact factor is supplied only for journals indexed by Web of Science.

Impact Factor can be located in InCites Journal Citation Report (JCR)

Impact Factor


SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)

Similar to Web of Science Impact Factor, SCImago provides ranking information on journals; the data is collected journals indexed by Scopus database.

SCImago Journal Rank

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