Cited Reference Searching & Journal Rankings: Alternative Metrics

How to locate articles and other documents that have cited a previously published document. Also how to determine where a journal is ranked in relation to others in its field.

What are Alternative Metrics?

Alternative metrics is the concept of broadly measuring the influence of one's scholarly body of work. It supplements the traditional article citation counts and journal impact measures with metrics that look at the scholarly, applied, social, economic uses and impacts of scholarly endeavors. Alternative metrics also expands the understanding of scholarly work beyond articles and books to include other contributions which advance knowledge and benefit society, including data sets, software and code, experimental design or innovation, presentations, blogging, commercial products, and much more.

Primary Tools for Alternative Metrics

A growing number of tools are being developed to help you measure the influence of your scholarly work. A few of the primary sources:

Impact Story
A web-based tool that helps researchers track the diverse impacts of all their research products--traditional ones like journal articles, but also alternative products like blog posts, datasets, and software. Annual fee. See example.
Assessment of Impact with Article-Level Metrics (ALMs)
Article-Level Metrics available for every article published by PLOS provide a comprehensive set of impact indicators that enable numerous ways to assess and navigate research most relevant to the field itself, including: usage, citations, social bookmarking and dissemination activity, media and blog coverage, and PLOS discussion activity and ratings.
Becker Medical Library Model for Assessment of Research Impact
A framework for tracking biomedical research outputs and activities to locate evidence of research impact. Using the Becker Model and publication analysis provides a more robust and comprehensive perspective of biomedical research impact. Also includes guidance for enhancing your research by optimizing discoverability.

Other Tools to Use/Watch

Acumen: Academic Careers Understood through Measurement and Norms
European research collaboration aimed at understanding the ways in which researchers are evaluated by their peers and by institutions, and at assessing how the science system can be improved and enhanced.
Altmetric.com
London-based company focused on making article level metrics easy. Their metric has been adopted by several main-stream publishers. See an example of the Altmetric 'score' for this article by clicking on the 'Article Metrics' link in the right column. Subscription based but offers a free bookmarklet for individuals.
Plum Analytics
Plum Analytics tracks activity around more than 20 different types of artifacts, including journal articles, books, videos, presentations, conference proceedings, datasets, source code, cases, and more. Subscription based.
Publish or Perish
Software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations using Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes and presents multiple metrics:
Scholarometer
A social tool to facilitate citation analysis and help evaluate the impact of an author's publications.

iCite
NIH tool to upload PMIDs of articles to access bibliometric data, including the Relative Citation Ratio which compares an article's citation impact to that of the average NIH-funded paper.

Author ID

One of the best steps to ensuring credit for your scholarly work is through Author IDs. Several Identification systems are available and most cooperate to share information. Register with all of the primary sites to distinguish yourself and your work from others with similar names.

ORCID
Open Researcher and Contributor ID, non-profit effort to maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers, reaching across disciplines, research sectors, and national boundaries through cooperation with other identifier systems.
Researcher ID
A product of Web of Science (WoS), ResearcherID is ORCID compliant and easily draws information from the WoS databases. This page link provides information about ResearcherID. To register, Marquette community can use the MyResearcherID link at the top of the WoS database page. Researchers at non-WoS institutions can register but must request an 'invite' at this page.
arXiv Author Identifiers
Currently to have a public author identifier and to expose the record of their articles on arXiv for use in other services is an opt-in service but is working toward transitioning all article submitters to the author ID system.
International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI)
ISO certified global standard number for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution, including researchers, inventors, writers, artists, visual creators, performers, producers, publishers, aggregators, and more.
VIAF: The Virtual International Authority File
combines multiple name authority files into a single OCLC-hosted name authority service. The goal of the service is to lower the cost and increase the utility of library authority files by matching and linking widely-used authority files and making that information available on the Web.