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Scholarly Research Impact Metrics

Subject Guide

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Rachel Borchardt
Contact:
Phone: 202-885-3657

Email: borchard@american.edu

Times Cited

The primary metric at the article level - a count of the number of times an article has been cited. There are three large, interdisciplinary databases that collect times cited:

Scite - want to see more about the context for your citations? Search Scite (by author, title, etc.) and its algorithm calculates whether collected citations are considered positive, negative, or neutral. You can also download an extension for Firefox, Chrome or Safari to view Scite information while using Scopus.

Views / Downloads

Page views and downloads are considered 'emerging metrics', but are quickly gaining acceptance, particularly as an early indicator of impact for articles.

These metrics are sometimes available from individual publishers, including PLoS, Taylor & Francis, and Elsevier.

Research networks including SSRN, ResearchGate, academia.edu and Mendeley also offer readership and/or download metrics.

Web of Science tracks Usage Counts, similar to an article download, back to 2013 for its articles as well

Institutional repositories, including our own repository, also tracks these metrics. See here for more details on our repository, or contact Rachel Borchardt, the digital repository coordinator, directly for more information.