Citation analysis and research visibility

Scopus, provided by Elsevier, is a curated citation and abstract database. Its content is selected by an independent board of experts, and it offers author and institution profiles generated by automated algorithms.

Scopus’s distinctive metrics include:

Article-level

• Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), which corrects for the differences between disciplines, publication years and types, allowing comparison between similar publications.
• Citation percentile, benchmarking the number of citations against similar papers.

Journal-level

• CiteScore, which measures the average number of citations for papers in a journal over a four-year period.
• Source Normalised Impact per Paper (SNIP), which adjusts for differences in citation practices between fields.
• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), which weights citations by the prestige of the citing source.

Inclusion in Scopus is heavily tilted towards English-language research.

You can use Scopus by logging in with your institutional email.

Find out more about Scopus

SciVal, from Elsevier, is a research-analytics tool built on Scopus data. It analyses and benchmarks the research performance of institutions, departments, research areas, groups and individuals, and can identify trends and potential collaborators, and visualise the results. Users can define their own custom collections by grouping researchers or outputs.

SciVal provides a wide range of contextual citation metrics (including the FWCI), citations per paper, citation percentile and geographic collaboration impact.

LSE has access to SciVal's "Core", "Collaboration" and "Benchmarking" modules.

Find out more about SciVal

Web of Science, owned by Clarivate, is a curated citation database with over a century of historical data. The WoS Core Collection is made up of ten indexes containing academic journals, books, and conference papers. Journals are included only once they have been vetted for quality and ethical standards by publisher-neutral experts. They are also actively re-evaluated, and if they fall short of WoS standards they can be put on hold or delisted.

Its careful curation and historical data make it particularly useful for citation searching and journal selection. WoS includes some non-English sources but research from the Global South is underrepresented in its index.

Web of Science can be used with an LSE email address.

Read further information on Web of Science including tutorials, guides, and workflows.

Google Scholar is a search engine for finding scientific publications, including papers, books and theses, and has the broadest coverage of academic outputs. This makes it especially useful for finding citations to books, grey literature and sources that other services do not reach. Metrics on the platform include the i10-index and the journal-level h5-index, which is an h-index based on papers published in the last five years.

Because its content is scraped automatically from the web, inclusion in Google Scholar is not indicative of quality. Search results can include non-peer-reviewed sources, and the platform is susceptible to manipulation. It also ranks results using a non-transparent algorithm that favours recent publications, without the option to export results in bulk for evaluation. Offline analysis is possible through the free Publish or Perish software.

Google Scholar can be used without logging in but using a Google account associated with an LSE email can provide full text access through the Library.

OpenAlex, run by the non-profit OurResearch, is a bibliographic database that offers a free alternative to commercial tools. It is built on open data and open source software, and its transparency enables reproducible bibliometric analysis. OpenAlex carries on the defunct Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) as its foundational database and expands it by drawing on open sources such as Crossref, DataCite, PubMed and institutional repositories.

Research coverage on OpenAlex is broad and multilingual, and, compared to other databases, has a better representation of non-Anglophone papers and research from the Global South. OpenAlex links to open access alternatives through Unpaywall and indexes the widest selection of diamond OA journals, thousands of titles not found in other databases. Metrics offered include the FWCI , h- and i10-indices and citation counts.

Its main limitations concern metadata quality. Many records in OpenAlex contain incorrect language tags, incomplete or inaccurate institutional affiliations and document types.

OpenAlex can be used freely through the website or via its API.

Find out more about OpenAlex [pdf]

Dimensions, operated by Digital Science, is a linked database that connects and contextualises data across the research lifecycle. It links grants, publications, datasets, and citations from various sources. The platform offers full-text search and data visualisation with tools such as VOSviewer.

Article-level metrics shown include Field Citation Ratio, which benchmarks papers against average citations of research from the same year and Field of Research (FoR) code, and the Relative Citation Ratio, which is based on comparing yearly citation rates of publications in the same field.

LSE has access to the free version of Dimensions which allows personal, non-commercial uses only.

For further information, see Dimensions’ quick start guide

Overton is a large database of policy documents and grey literature with a platform for tracking and analysing the research they draw on through citations and mentions of researchers. The platform is valuable for exploring the policy landscape of a field, demonstrating the policy impact of research, and identifying which journals are more likely to reach policymakers. Overton can be accessed using your LSE credentials.

Read our guide on how to use Overton for evidencing policy impact

Altmetric Explorer, from Digital Science, tracks the online attention that research outputs receive in real-time. It monitors citations and links in a wide range of sources, including news, social media (X/Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook), blogs, Wikipedia articles, and YouTube videos.

You can login to Altmetric Explorer with your LSE email.

Read our guide on using Altmetric for evidencing public engagement with research

Citation analysis examines the links between publications to gauge how research is taken up, by whom, and how works, authors, institutions and areas connect to one another. This data can be informative about the potential impact of publications, authors, or institutions, and can be part of research assessment exercises.

Bibliometrics is the broader statistical study of publications and their citations, producing quantitative indicators (or metrics). Altmetrics, or "alternative metrics", complement these by tracking online attention and engagement beyond academia in sources including news, policy documents, social media, blogs and podcasts.

Citations and the metrics based on them only act as indicators that an output is used but they are not a direct measure of quality. Citations are not neutral, for example a paper can be cited in order to criticise it. Citation practices are discipline-specific and change over time, so the same number can mean very different things in different fields. Some indicators are better normalised or weighted to correct for these differences. For meaningful assessment, multiple metrics should be used and interpreted in the context of qualitative information and expert judgement.

The following platforms provide tools and indicators to measure scholarly influence. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, offers different datasets and approaches. No database is comprehensive, and none offers a single definitive measure of impact. We have categorised these tools as measuring academic impact and broader, societal impact. However, multiple tools offer pathways to measuring both, and this list reflects LSE’s recommendation on which tools to use.