Citation analysis and research visibility
Understand how your research improves the world
In today's world, researchers are requested not only to publish high quality research findings but enhance their access and discoverability. This page will provide you with various techniques and tools to increase and measure your research visibility and ultimately boost your citation performance.
Citation analysis (also referred as citation tracking) is “the study of the relationship between and among the authors of texts, mainly for the purpose of identifying relevance and influence (International Encyclopaedia of Information and Library Science). In others, it is about citation frequency.
Considerations
- The citation data will relate only to articles indexed within the database. If the author is cited primarily in books, non-English language journals, or journals not covered by citation databases, the usefulness of the citation analysis is limited.
- Citations are a researcher's subjective choice, which can be affected by many factors, eg, age or easy availability of a publication.
- Different citations in a paper are usually unequally important - the cited reference is either marginally or highly related to the article citing it.
- Poor quality papers can be cited while being criticised or refuted.
Bibliometrics is the quantitative analysis of written documents. It is frequently used to analyse scientific and scholarly publications (Centre for Science and Technology Studies).
LSE researchers are encouraged to make sure they are using quantitative indicators in an informed way. As well as being robust and transparent, they are likely to be discipline‑specific and to vary over time. It is therefore important that they are used in context, taking into account the discipline and timeframe under consideration. It is increasingly recognised, that bibliometrics should be used in combination with other qualitative measures when being used to assess quality as expressed in the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics.
Watch the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics from Diana Hicks on Vimeo.
Read the LSE Statement on the Responsible Use of Citation Metrics. [DOC]
Citation analysis may be conducted for following purposes:
- To establish or quantify the academic influence that a particular research output has had by identifying which other authors based their work upon it or cited it within their own papers.
- To discover how research findings are being used.
- To learn more about a field or a topic.
- To assess relationships between authors, fields.
Citation tools
There are several tools available for citation analysis, some are subscription-based and others are free. However, no single database covers all works that cite other works. Searching across several databases is necessary to get a fuller picture of the scholarly influence of an author, a publication or a journal.
Increasingly, ejournal platforms and subject-specialist bibliographic databases include citation data within their article records.
Web of Science
Web of Science (WoS) is a citation database, covering academic journals worldwide in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, and conference proceedings. It is updated daily.
WoS’s data is also used to compile Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports, Essential Science Indicators, and Highly Cited Researchers.
Web of Science is cross-indexed with Google Scholar. Reciprocal links allow users to run the same search across both platforms, locating full texts where available. Cross-indexing is explained on this page.
Access Web of Science
You can access Web of Science on campus and from home. This will also enable you to connect to the full-text articles that LSE has licensed.
Read further information on Web of Science including tutorials, guides, journal submission process etc.
Scopus (by Elsevier)
Scopus is considered to be the primary competitor to the Web of Science database for citation analysis. It might be slightly more international in coverage than Web of Science and the current Scopus interface is more intuitive to use. It is updated daily.
Access Scopus
You can access Scopus on campus and from home. This will also enable you to connect to the full-text articles that LSE has licensed.
For further information on using Scopus, visit Elsevier’s Scopus support centre.
Google Scholar
Google scholar is not a human-curated database but an academic search engine of the Web which narrows the results to 'scholarly' ones based on machine automated criteria. For instance, Google Scholar will count citations from online slide sets, reports, undergraduate essays and other sources.
Although Google Scholar does not provide a list of the sources that it is searching to find citations to publications, many research studies have demonstrated that Google Scholar has by far the largest absolute coverage. It is estimated that Google Scholar holds more than 389 million records (Gusenbauer, 2019). Google doesn’t specify how often it is updated but some say it is updated on a monthly basis.
Citations to some specific types of outputs, for example, books, book chapters, working papers are likely to be much better in Google than WoS or Scopus which don’t provide good coverage for those. This may be very important to be aware of for academics working in subject fields in which monographs occupy a prominent place.
The downside is that some voice concerns over its lack of differentiating citations that may not originate from peer-reviewed literature as it picks up broader types of publications. Also, it seems that Google Scholar may not pick up citations from older content or give them less weight than more recent ones.
To date, Google Scholar is by far the most frequently used academic search engine, but it is not the only one. There is Semantic Scholar which is a free tool (built at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence) which applies artificial intelligence to extract the meaning from the scientific literature. Since October 2019, it searches publications from social sciences. Open Alex being the new kid on the block (and whose coverage is broader than Scopus and WoS but narrower than Google Scholar) will launch in September 2022.
Publish or Perish is a free and downloadable software developed by (Professor Anne-Wil Harzing) that retrieves and analyse Google Scholar’s data.
Dimensions (Digital Science)
Dimensions is a linked data platform launched by Digital Science in January 2018. The free version of the database includes access to publication and citation counts only (the grants, policy, patent or clinical trial information are available for subscribers only) and studies have shown that Dimensions' scholarly coverage offers a strong alternative to Scopus and the Web of Science for general citation analyses and for citation data in support of research evaluation exercises.
For further information, visit Dimensions’ resource page.
Overton
Overton is a bibliometric database of policy document citations. It collects millions of policy documents and links them to the research, people and other policy documents that they quote or reference. Overton is used by researchers to study the dynamics of real world policymaking and also to track the impact of their own work on policy.
Access off campus: by invite link only. To receive it, email library.bibliometrics@lse.ac.uk.
Research Analytics tools
SciVal (Elsevier)
Additionally, LSE provides access to SciVal (registered users only) which is a bibliometric tool that uses Scopus data to analyse the research performance of individuals or groups.
SciVal can:
- give an overview of the research performance of an institution and others based on output, impact, and collaborations
- benchmark determine strengths and weaknesses. Compare any research institution and teams to others based on performance indicators.
- identify and analyse existing and potential collaboration opportunities.
Access SciVal
Please contact the Library Research Information Analyst to get access or more information about this tool.
Altmetric Explorer for Institutions
The Library subscribes to Altmetric Explorer for Institutions. This tool tracks online attention of scholarly outputs, including mentions in policy documents, mainstream media and social media. This information complements citation data as it also reflects the influence and reach of the research being analysed.
Note that this data is not comprehensive because this tool only works on scholarly outputs that have a unique identifier (in LSE research outputs’ case, it must be a DOI) and it must be embedded within the metadata.
Please contact the Library Research Information Analyst to register and use the resource.
We offer advice, support and training on the tools available to gather data related to citation analysis.
Please contact the Library Research Information Analyst to discuss your needs.
For example, we can help you answer questions such as:
- How many citations have my publications received? By whom?
- How do I find out which journals are in the top quartile for my field?
- What is the expected citation rate for papers in my subject field?
- How your department or centre compares to selected peer institutions in one or more subject categories?
- What is the percentage of documents appearing in the top 1%, 10%, 25% citation percentile?
- Which institutions does your department/centre collaborate with overseas?
There are a number of resources that can teach you more about bibliometrics. Here are a few of our favourites: