SUIT & KSMA Resource Guide
What is research 'impact'?
Citations
Citations (i.e. referencing) is an example of scholarly 'impact' and can be a proxy for identifying whether a research article has been read by lots of other experts with the findings credited in other published articles. Remember that a citation can only be a 'signal' of re-use and that a paper receiving lots of citations is not an absolute proxy for high quality research. You should always take the time to try and investigate what the citations are concluding about the original article. Citations can be:
- positive (the article is a good piece of research - lots of positive citations could mean you have found a groundbreaking piece of research?)
- negative (the findings have been refuted by subsequent research studies)
- neutral (simply stating that previous research has been done in this area)
The tools on this page provide different insights into the attention research articles have received by other scholars or, more broadly, e.g. social media or news coverage. There are also free tools that allow you to identify an author's most cited publications.
Research impact tools
Scopus author profile look up
A free version of the Scopus indexing and abstracting database is available to the public providing access to author profiles. It's a good way to see all of an author's output as indexed by Scopus and to see the citations an author's outputs have received. You will have to sign up to a Scopus Preview account to be able to search for an author's profile.
Altmetric bookmarklet
Altmetric bookmarklet is a browser extension that will pop up when you are visiting a research article's webpage with a DOI (usually the publisher's page) and provides an 'attention score' for the article. It's a donut shaped pop up that shows the social media attention, news coverage and policy mentions received by article. It can provide useful context of societal impact of the article beyond academia.
Open Citations
Open Citations is part of the Open Access helper browser extension that shows how many scholarly citations the paper has received. Often, this information is provided as part of the publisher's page, even on paywalled papers, but sometimes it is hidden and Open Citations can provide a glimpse into who is citing the article. It will automatically pop up on your desktop if you have already activated the OA Helper browser extension for finding open versions of paywalled papers.
scite_
scite_ is a browser extension useful for adding context to citations. It will sit on your desktop and 'pop up' when you visit a published article's webpage with a doi (usually the publisher's page). It will show you how many of the citations are positive, neutral i.e. just 'mention'/refer to the article, or negative. **Please note: the pop up will tell you (free of charge) how many citations are positive, neutral or negative but a subscription is required to view the details of the citations.**