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Strategic Publishing, Research Impact & Researcher Profiles: Article Level Metrics

This guide covers scholarly publishing strategies, how to choose a journal, discusses Open Access publishing models, how to evaluate research impact, and provides tips around managing researcher profiles

Article level Metrics

 

Article level metrics measure the usage and impact of individual scholarly articles, including the number of citations, downloads, and altmetrics. The most used article level metrics are Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and Citation Percentile; they are field normalised metrics. 

Field Weighted Citation Impact

 

FWCI indicators can also be calculated at the article level. This calculation is a ratio of the number of citations received by an article compared to the average or expected number of citations received by other similar publications. 

 

Example: A FWCI of 1.00 means that the output performs just as expected for the global average. Whereas a score of 1.48 indicates the output is cited 48% more than expected. 

Percentile of citations in the subject area 

 

A citation percentile measures the number of citations for an article against a benchmark set of similar papers (in terms of field, publication year and document type). An article with no citations has a percentile of 0, and the article with the most citations has a percentile score of 100.  

 

Example: If an article is ranked in the 99th citation percentile, it means it is in the top 1% of most cited papers from similar papers in the field. 

Tools for article level metrics 

  • Scopus -  In Scopus, article-level metrics can be found within the article metrics tag from an article record. 
  • Web of Science Core Collection - On the Web of Science, Articles’ Citation Percentile can be located from the Author Impact Full Beamplot within an Author Profile. 
  • SciVal and InCites - are good tools for finding article-level metrics.