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Scholarly Metrics

An overview of scholarly metrics and the tools you can use to find them.

Considerations when finding and using article metrics

  • Article metrics vary by source, so Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar will usually show different citation counts for the same publication.
  • Article metrics are inflated for some types of publications (e.g., articles describing software or lab procedure).
  • Citations are primarily counted to/from articles, so metrics are not typically available for books, book chapters, and other publication type.

Finding article metrics (FWCI) in Scopus

  1. Start in Scopus.
  2. Search for an article title, and click on it in your results list.
  3. The article's Field-weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) will be displayed below the author affiliations.

Finding article metrics using PubMed and iCite

The Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) is a metric available for publications indexed in PubMed. It's calculated as the number of cites per year of an article, normalized to the number of citations per year received by NIH-funded articles in the same field and year. So, for example, paper with an RCR of 1.0 has received the same number of cites/year as the median NIH-funded paper in its field, while a paper with an RCR of 2.0 has received twice as many cites/year as the median NIH-funded paper in its field.

Currently, the easiest and best way to calculate the RCR for an article (or set of articles by a particular author) is to use an NIH tool called iCite.   

  1. To find the RCR for an article (or author), start on the iCite analysis page.
  2. In the PubMed search box, enter the article title or the author's name formatted as "Lastname Initials" Example: Strassmann JE
  3. Click on the blue "Process" button at the bottom of the screen
  4. On the results page, under "Customization", you can use the date option, exclude non-articles, and/or deselect items you do not want to include in the calculation. As you change the parameters, the results automatically update. To see a definition of each category, mouse over the category header. For details about the information on the results page (and more), click on the Help link in the upper right corner of the screen.

Due to how the Relative Citation Ratio is calculated, it is only available for articles indexed in PubMed, and it is based only on citations from articles indexed by PubMed. 

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