Measuring

Your Scholarly Impact

Big Ideas Caf Fall 2014
Measuring
Your Scholarly Impact
Definitions
Bibliometrics is the
quantitative evaluation
of publication and
citation data.
The impact of a
publication is
measured by counting
the number of times
the work is cited by
other resources.
Prepared by
Bonnie Shucha, Assistant Director for Public Services
UW Law Library
Bonnie.Shucha@wisc.edu
Metrics Tools
Only as Good as the Data They Are Based On
Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com
Google Scholar, a free search engine for scholarly literature, has strong coverage in the
humanities and social sciences. It indexes legal articles in HeinOnline, JSTOR, SSRN,
and many other databases and websites.
To view citations to an authors work, go to Google Scholar at the URL above. Enter
in authors first and last name. Be sure that Articles is selected and click search.
In your search results, note the number of times that each article was cited.

If the author has created a public profile, a link will appear at the top of the results list.


Altmetrics, short for
alternative metrics,
provide an alternative
impact measure.
It can include the
number of downloads
or views of a work
online and/or its reach
through social media,
social bookmarking,
and other
collaboration tools.
For a short video on the
value and use of
bibliometrics in
evaluating scholarly
impact, see
http://goo.gl/g1LLl3

Video


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Big Ideas Caf Fall 2014

Creating a Google Scholar Citations Profile
With Google Scholar, authors can create a profile to track citations to their articles. You can check
who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and view several citation metrics.
If you make your profile public (optional), it will appear in Google Scholar results when someone
searches for your name.













If you would like to receive an alert when new publications or citations appear in
your profile, click on the Follow this author links on the right.
You can also follow the work of other authors this way
if they have made their profiles public.

For a short video on how
to set up your Citations
Profile in Google Scholar,
see http://goo.gl/VzUgSU

Video
For more detailed
instructions on setting up
your profile, see
http://goo.gl/0aCPUR
Instructions
Several tools offer more
sophisticated searching and
analysis of Google Scholar
citation data.

Scholarometer
(http://goo.gl/F1P28e) is
a browser extension with a
widget that authors can
display on their websites.








Publish or Perish
(http://goo.gl/SLz1IB) is
software that calculates
additional impact metrics.
Supplemental
Tools


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Big Ideas Caf Fall 2014
Web of Science - http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.web/wok
Web of Science is a subscription-based citation indexing service. Its coverage is strongest in the sciences, but
it does also index some humanities and social sciences publications.
To view citations to an authors work, open the campus libraries subscription to WoS at the URL above. In
the search box, enter authors last name followed by first initial. Select Author and click search.

This will retrieve a list of articles written by the author with corresponding citation counts.



Click on Create Citation Report for more detailed citation analysis of all the authors work in WoS.
For a video tutorial of the WoS Citation
Report tool, see http://goo.gl/pMV81c

Video


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Big Ideas Caf Fall 2014

Social Science Research Network (SSRN) - http://www.ssrn.com/en/
SSRN is an open access repository to which authors can upload their social sciences scholarship. SSRN
displays both the number of times an authors work was cited and the number of times it was downloaded.

The download count in SSRN is a valuable alternative to the more traditional citation metric. It
demonstrates that while a work may not have garnered a lot of citations, it may still have attracted wide
interest and readership.

To view citations and downloads for an authors work, open SSRN at the URL above. Click on the Search
tab and do a search by authors name. Or, to find UW Law School authors, see the UW Law School
Research Paper Series page at http://goo.gl/gGXdwQ.



In the results list, click on the authors name to open their profile. The profile contains all of the works that
an author has uploaded to SSRN. It includes citation and download counts for each work, as well as
aggregate totals for all of the authors works.







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Big Ideas Caf Fall 2014

HeinOnline Law Journal Library - http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.web/heinonline
HeinOnlines Law Journal Library is a subscription database of legal journals. Coverage ranges from very
early to more recent volumes.

For each article in the Law Journal Library, HeinOnline indicates both how many articles and cases that cite
the article, as well as how many times it has been accessed on HOL.



Like the download count in SSRN, the access count in HeinOnline may be a useful alternative metric. While
an article may not have garnered a lot of citations, it may still have attracted wide interest and readership.

Note that in your search results, you can sort by the number of times that the article was cited or accessed.
This is useful if you wish to see which articles had the highest impact.



To see a list of the articles or cases that have cited your article, click on the
Cited by links either in the search results list or in the document itself.












If you would like to
receive an email alert
when an article is cited,
see the short how-to
video at
http://goo.gl/LIyGEC.
Video