NOAA Seattle Library > Research Tools > Bibliometrics

Overview

Bibliometrics, citation analysis, or author/lab/journal impact, is a method aimed at determining the importance and influence of (typically peer-reviewed) journals, journal articles and their authors. Several techniques have been developed and there is active discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of each. Below you will find articles discussing these techniques and the controversies, as well as the tools most often used to gather and analyze the data.

The analysis can be performed on authors, journals or institutions, but the tools and methods can differ depending on which category is chosen. Here are some quick tip and caveats for each.

• Journals - The primary tool for bibliometrics on journals is Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The calculations are done yearly by Thomson and presented through JCR. The key measure in JCR is the Impact Factor, though there is on-going debate over the true accuracy and value of this measure. Some of the articles below touch on this debate.
• Authors - The primary tool available to NOAA for bibliometrics on authors is Web of Science. Important factors to consider while analyzing citations to authors are variations and inaccuracies in the formats of names that introduce ambiguity and self-citations. Name variations can be addressed by truncating names (using * at the end of a name) to capture all variations. Then, one can look at each cited reference to determine if the paper is actually by the target author. There are now tools to remove self-citations in a cited reference list. Tools such as ResearcherID are also aimed at addressing the issue of ambiguous citations. Another emerging means of measuring author impact is the Hirsch index or h-index. Some of the tools below assist with calculating and interpreting the h-index. Similar to the h-index, Egghe index or g-index also measures author's impact but is more complicated to calculate.
• Institutions - The primary tool available to NOAA for bibliometrics on institutions is Web of Science. Important factors to consider while analyzing citations to institutions are variations in the formats. NOAA and its various offices, for instance, have been cited using thousands of variations. Zip code can be used to capture all variations in a given lab's name, but that may still include inappropriate or exclude appropriate citations. Also, if performing analysis on institutions using personal authors, make sure to count papers co-authored by colleagues in the same lab once.

Web of Science (Science Citation Index) 1965 -
Bibliometric features in Web of Science include cited reference searching as well as citation analysis tools that will work on the article or author level. Please see the user education page for Web of Science training resources.

Journal Citation Reports (Science Edition) 2006 -
Journal Citation Reports (Science Edition) aggregates and tabulates citation and article counts as indicators of how frequently current researchers are using individual journals. It contains data from over 5,900 journals in science and technology allowing one to evaluate and compare journals. Help includes Using Journal Citation Reports Wisely as well as a table of contents for more specific questions. Pre-recorded training sessions are also available.
Highly Cited Research
Presents analysis of Web of Science data to identify individuals, departments and laboratories that have made fundamental contributions to the advancement of science and technology in recent decades.
Academic Ranking of World Universities
Also known as the Shanghai ranking, it was first published in June 2003 by the Center for World-Class Universities and the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China and is now updated annually.
Google Scholar
The search results list in Google Scholar now links to documents citing and articles related to a single article. The total number of citing documents may often be higher than results in Web of Science because it includes documents not indexed in Web of Science, but it may also be duplicative or otherwise less authoritative. Also, the Scholar H-Index Calculator, is a Firefox add-on that will automatically display citation indices (h-index, etc.). The advanced mode allows manual selection of papers, editing of self citations and author count values and much more. If using Zotero, with Firefox, Zotero Scholar Citations, is a Firefox/Zotero add-on for auto-fetching the number of citations from Google Scholar.

SCImago
Analysis of journal ranking using data from the Scopus database and the Google PageRank algorithm
SNIP and SJR
More analysis using information from the Scopus database.
Eigenfactor
Analysis of journal ranking that uses data from Thomson databases (Web of Science) and algorithms similar to the Google PageRank algorithm. This analysis is also presented in a visualization at well-formed.eigenfactor.org
Publish or Perish
Free downloadable software that performs citation analysis on Google Scholar results.
ResearcherID
A Thomson tool to help disambiguate names to facilitate more accurate tracking of researchers' and institutions' publications.
BIBEXCEL
Assist a user in analyzing bibliographic data, or any data of a textual nature formatted in a similar manner, by generating data files that can be imported to Excel, or any program that takes tabbed data records, for further processing.
Science of Science (Sci2) Tool
A modular toolset specifically designed for the study of science. It supports the temporal, geospatial, topical, and network analysis and visualization of scholarly datasets at the micro (individual), meso (local), and macro (global) levels.
altmetrics
A collection of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing, and informing scholarship.