Research Guides: Measuring Your Research Impact: Article-Level Metrics

Citation Counts

Web of Science

Google Scholar

iCite

iCite is a NIH-developed tool that provides metrics (traditional metrics, as well as metrics and visualizations developed by the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis) about journal articles that are included in PubMed. You can search using author names, MeSH terms, or PubMed IDs -- you can search, using up to 10,000 PubMed IDs, for articles published as early as 1980. You can also upload a spreadsheet of PubMed IDs.

Results can be downloaded as a customized report for further use or visualization. You can use iCite to get a view of how the influence of your publications compares against other articles coming from NIH-funded research, or to demonstrate their actual and potential translation into clinical trials and guidelines.

These metrics include the following:

Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): An article-level metric that purports to represent a citation-based measure of scientific influence. It is calculated as the number of citations per year of a paper, normalized (according to field and time) based on the total number of citations received divided by the total number of citations that could be "expected" (which is calculated based on the average number of citations that articles in the "similar" research area have received). A paper with an RCR of 1.0 has received the same number of citations per year as the median NIH-funded paper in the same field, while a paper with an RCR of 2.0 has received twice as many citations per year as the median NIH-funded paper in its field.
Weighted RCR: The sum of the RCRs for the articles that were analyzed. A "highly influential" set of articles will have a Weighted RCR that is higher than the total number of publications in the analyzed set.
Clinical Citations: The number of publications cited by a clinical document. Click over to the "Translation" tab to see this metric.
Approximate Potential to Translate (APT): Machine learning-based estimate of the likelihood that an article will be cited in future clinical trials and clinical guidelines. This metric is also found in the "Translation" tab.
Citations: In the "Citations" tab, you will find citation links in the NIH Open Citation Collection. They are currently sourced from CrossRef, MedLine, and PubMed Central.

iCite
Powerful web tool that provides traditional citation metrics, along with the Relative Citation Ratio and other metrics and visualizations developed by the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis.
iCite User Guide

Increasing Your Research's Visibility

Publication in traditional venues are not the only way to share your work. Consider depositing copies of your publications in open access repositories such as DASH, in pre-print servers such as bioRxiv or medRxiv, and/or sharing your data via depositories like Dataverse. This helps your scholarship reach a broader audience, and thus leads to an increase in your research's impact.

DASH
A central, open-access repository of research by members of the Harvard community. DASH enlarges the audience and impact of your work. Authors who deposit in DASH have access to on-demand metrics and receive monthly reports about their readership. Deposited works receive persistent URLs, are comprehensively indexed by search engines, including Google and Google Scholar, reach academic and non-academic readers who may not have access to the original publications, and are preserved by the Harvard Library.
DASH is the university's central, open access repository for the scholarly output of faculty and the broader research community at Harvard.
Harvard Dataverse
A free data repository open to all researchers from any discipline, where you can share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data. Each individual Dataverse collection is a customizable collection of datasets (or a virtual repository) for organizing, managing, and showcasing datasets.
The Harvard-MIT Data Center is the principal repository of quantitative social science data at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The majority of its holdings are available to Harvard and MIT affiliates directly via its web site through its search engine. Graduate students and faculty with a Harvard or MIT Library card can check out paper code books from libraries at either institution, under Harvard's and MIT's reciprocal borrowing agreement. In addition, the Data Center has negotiated a special agreement for undergraduates and summer graduate students, who are not covered by the standard agreement.

protocols.io
A collaborative platform and preprint server for methods and protocols; helpful for researchers in any discipline that uses a step-by-step methodology, including life sciences, engineering, chemistry, data science, and computational social sciences.
bioRxiv
biology preprint server
medRxiv
health sciences preprint server