LibGuides: Measuring Research Impact: Article Impact

What are Article-Level Metrics?

Article-level metrics incorporate traditional metrics, such as number of citations, and new metrics ('altmetrics'), such as number of downloads, to quantify the impact of an article. Article-level metrics provide a more complete picture of how an individual article is being discussed, shared and used within and beyond the scholarly community.

Researchers continue to investigate methods for using citation rates to measure article influence. Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), an algorithm developed by the National Institutes of Health, utilizes an expected citation rate, based on performance of articles in the same field, to quantify the influence of an article.

Scroll down, or use the tabs to view more information about finding article-level metrics and relative citation ratios.

The preceding statements were adapted from SPARC: Article Level Metrics, PLoS: A Comprehensive Assessment of Impact with Article-Level Metrics, and 'Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric that Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level'.

Article-level metrics for article published in Nature

Find Article-Level Metrics

Several databases and publishers provide article-level metrics. These metrics depend on the content that is searched. For example, the number of citations that an article has received in Web of Science will likely be different than the number it has received in either Scopus or Google Scholar.

Altmetric
Altmetric tracks and analyzes online activity such as mainstream media, social media and publisher download data, for mentions of scholarly literature. This data is used to calculate an Altmetric score, which is a measure of the quality and quantity of attention that an article has received. Several publishers, including Nature Publishing Group, Wiley Online Library, Springer, BioMed Central and JAMA, provide the Altmetric score. Look for the Altmetric icon when viewing articles on a publisher's site, or install the Almetric bookmarklet in your browser, which enables you to get Almetric details when viewing articles in PubMed, and on pages with a digital object identifier (DOI).
Bookmetrix
Developed in partnership with Springer Nature, this platform provides number of citations, downloads, online mentions and reviews for books and book chapters published by Springer, Palgrave Macmillan and Apress. If available, these metrics are displayed on individual book and chapter pages on SpringerLink (link above).
Dimensions
Dimensions is a discovery and analytics platform that provides article-level metrics, including number of citations, Relative Citation Ratio and altmetrics, for more than 90 million publications.

CINAHL
This database indexes nursing, consumer health, and allied health journals, trade publications, dissertations and books. CINAHL provides article-level metrics, such as number of abstract views or mentions on Twitter, from Plum Analytics, a company that aggregates and evaluates altmetrics. Look for the PlumX Metrics icon and link when viewing a list of results in CINAHL.
Google Scholar
Searches scholarly literature available on the web. Provides number of citations per article.

PLOS Article-Level Metrics
PLOS provides article-level metrics, such as number of views and downloads, for articles published in its journals. When viewing an article, look for the metrics box in the upper right-hand corner. ALM Reports allows you to visualize metrics for a set of up to 500 PLOS articles.

PubMed@Tufts
When viewing the abstract for an article in PubMed, look for the 'Cited by PubMed Central articles' column on the right to see articles in PubMed Central that have cited your article. If you submitted an article to PubMed Central via the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system, then you can view the number of users who have accessed your article once the article is publicly available in PubMed Central (PMC). Data is only available for articles submitted through NIHMS. Statistics are limited to PMC usage and do not include access from a publisher's site or anywhere else the article may be posted. To find PMC access statistics in NIHMS, select the Available in PMC tab, then click the link in the Status column.
SCOPUS
This interdisciplinary database indexes journals, conference proceedings, trade publications and books in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. Scopus provides number of citations per article, as well as other article-level metrics, such as number of abstract views or mentions on Twitter, from Plum Analytics, a company that aggregates and evaluates altmetrics. Percentile bench-marking allows you to compare an article's metrics to averages for similar articles. Look for article-level metrics in the Metrics box in the right-hand column on an article's details page.
Web of Science
This interdisciplinary database indexes journals, conference proceedings and books in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. Web of Science provides number of citations per article.

Find Relative Citation Ratios

Analysts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed an alternative measure of article influence, the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR). RCR can be used to compare the performance of articles in the same field.

RCR is calculated by dividing article citation rate (ACR) by an expected citation rate (ECR), which is based on the number of citations that similar articles in the same field have received.

RCR = ACR/ECR

iCite can be used to calculate RCRs for articles in PubMed.

Source: Hutchins BI, Yuan X, Anderson JM, Santangelo GM (2016) Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level. PLoS Biol 14(9): e1002541. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002541

Dimensions
Dimensions is a discovery and analytics platform that provides article-level metrics, including number of citations, Relative Citation Ratio and altmetrics, for more than 90 million publications.
iCite
Tool for evaluating a set of journal articles in PubMed. Provides: number of articles in the set; mean number of articles published per year; number of citations per year; Relative Citation Ratio; weighted Relative Citation Ratio.

Measuring Research Impact

What are Article-Level Metrics?

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