Understanding Metrics / Altmetrics: Home

Measure the impact of your work and your impact as a researcher using traditional and alternative metrics. Traditional Metrics: Traditional metrics are widely recognized methods of measuring scholarly impact. Impact factor: Impact factor (or journal impact factor) measures the yearly average citations for a journal to evaluate its overall impact in the field. You can find a journal’s impact factor using Journal Citation Reports. What’s it mean? An impact factor of 2. 0 means that, on average, articles published in the journal were cited 2 times in the past 1-2 years. h-index: h-index measures your impact as an author based on your productivity as well as the citation impact of your publications. You can find your h-index using Web of Science. What’s it mean? An h-index of 8 means that the author has 8 publications that have been cited at least 8 times. Alternative Metrics: Alternative Metrics, or altmetrics, are non-traditional metrics that can be used to complement traditional metrics in understanding the broader scholarly impact of a work. The following categories of altmetrics can be measured in several ways. Viewed: Views include the number of HTML views and PDF downloads for a particular article. Discussed: Discussion of an article on social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogging platforms). Saved: Social bookmarking is tracked by some citation management tools (e. g. Mendeley, CiteULike). Cited: Citations in non-traditional knowledge sources like Wikipedia. Recommended: Some platforms (e.g. Faculty of 1000) allow users to rank and recommend papers. Watch the videos to learn how to find journal impact factor and author h-index and to get started with altmetrics.