Research Guides: Biology / Life Sciences Resources (BIOL, CBMG, ENTM): Metrics/Impact

Introduction

This page contains key resources related to measuring/understanding impat of scholarly works in the life sciences. A more comprehensive list has been created by other librarians at UMD.

Impact of an article and/or a researcher - including tracking citations and calculating h-Index

SciFinder-n You must first create an account using your @umd.edu email address to use the web version. Unlimited simultaneous users. To use off-campus, sign into the GlobalProtect VPN and change the gateway setting to TunnelAll. SciFinder-n is published by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) and gives you access to current high-quality scientific information in chemistry and related sciences. Content at a Glance: searching MEDLINE and Chemical Abstracts (CAPLUS) individually or at the same time; more than 15 million reactions; more than 1 billion predicted property values; more than 2 million experimental properties; the CAS REGISTRY database is updated daily; patent records from the major patent offices are available online within 2 days of the patents' issuance; sequences combined from CAS and GenBank databases, which are indexed and linked to scientific journal and patent literature.
Google Scholar Google Scholar searches academic publishers, professional societies, pre-print archives, and university institutional repositories.
Essential Science Indicators
ESI can determine the influential individuals, institutions, papers, publications, and countries in a field of study — as well as emerging research areas that can impact one's work. A series of videos about ESI is available.

Impact of Journals, Institutions and/or Countries - including Impact Factors

Journal Citation Reports
View/compare such parameters as Impact Factor and Immediacy Index for a journal or group of journals. Can also view by broad subject area.
Essential Science Indicators
ESI can determine the influential individuals, institutions, papers, publications, and countries in a field of study — as well as emerging research areas that can impact one's work. A series of videos about ESI is available.

Altmetrics

Altmetrics is a broad term describing a variety of new measures and methods used to determine the impact of scholarly output. Altmetrics has garnered interest as an alternative or complement to the more traditional Impact Factor or even the relatively recent h-index. Some notable characteristics of altmetrics:

They track more than citations. Previous measures of impact relied heavily, if not exclusively, on citations. Almetrics consider other ways scholarly output is mentioned or discussed. This can be mentions on social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook as well as mentions by news outlets, blogs and other non-peer-reviewed publications. Other measures might look at the number of "readers" or downloads.
Altmetrics can be used to track more than journal articles. Using these new metrics, nearly any sort of scholarly output can be tracked for use, reuse, mentions, sharing, etc. This would include both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed items. Data sets, working papers, computer code, dissertations, etc., could all be tracked using appropriate systems.

Altmetric Bookmarklet
Reading a paper and want to find out its Altmetric details? Install this free bookmarklet for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Simply drag the button to your bookmarks bar, navigate to a journal article page, and hit "Altmetric it!" The bookmarklet will give the Almetric score and provide further details about where that article has been mentioned through various outlets. There must be a DOI available for the bookmarklet to work.