Library Resources in the Tenure and Promotion Process  Tags: tenure promotion citation analysis journal rankings  

There are a number of resources that can be used to determine where and how your publications are being cited. 

Web of Knowledge [Select Web of Science from the database listings]

This series of citation based indexes: Science, Arts & Humanities, and Social Sciences was developed by Eugene Garfield. They are regarded as the most comprehensive source for analyzing the citations to authors in the journal literature. Science covers 1900-present; Social Sciences covers 1956-present; Arts & Humanities covers 1975-present.

Criticism of these tools suggests that coverage of these indexes is largely English language journals from developed countries. Coverage of regional and non-English journals is extremely uneven. Also, errors in methodologies of their scholarly studies are not uncommon. Details of one study, done by a UF faculty member was reported in “The Journal of Physical Oceanography and ISI’s life science research,” IAMSLIC Conference Proceedings, 1995.

To use: Go to Cited Reference Search and in the Cited Author field type your last name, first initial followed by an asterisk, e.g., Kisling V*(the asterisk picks up the middle initial(s)). Name entry formats are not standardized so be sure to check variations, which you can find by using the search aid to the right of the input box. If you have co-authored papers, your name will appear precede by … 

Use the Cited Work field to find all references to a cited work, e.g.,  to find references to Darwin's The Origin of Species use the search aid till you locate "Origin Species".  Different editions will be entered separately.

Hirsch index, developed by Jorge Hirsch, UCSD, measures both scientific productivity and impact. The metrics look at the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. It has applicability to measure productivity of individual researchers and of collaborative scientific groups such as departments, but is not suitable for cross discipline comparisons. H-index will vary according to the base source used: Google Scholar or Web of Knowledge. Please see detailed discussion on this at Wikipedia h-index, viewed 30 January 2009. Also see the discussion of the g-index under the Herzing’s Publish or Perish entry below.

Blog posting: Do you know your Hirsch number? On Gobbledygook, Martin Fenner’s blog on scientific publishing in the internet age, Friday 17 Aug 2007. [Viewed 30 January 2009 ]

Google Scholar

Growing awareness of the number of full text items available over the internet is leading to new sets of web-based metric tools. While the Web of Science searches only on ISI-listed journals, Google Scholar searches books as well as scholarly journal articles, conference papers, doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, and working papers. It also covers international and foreign language journals better than the Web of Science. For this reason, it tends to be stronger for Humanities-related disciplines.

To use: Use the Advanced Scholar Search to find the publications of a particular author. In the Author search field enter the author's full name, or last name and initials, enter the name in quotes: ["jh friedman"]; click on the “Search Scholar” button. In the results list, if a work has been cited by another article indexed in Google Scholar, a Cited by # label appears and you can click on it to see what articles have cited that work.

Harzing’s Publish or Perish citation metrics

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and calculates a series of citation metrics. The program must be downloaded to your computer. These metrics include: “g-index The g-index was proposed by Leo Egghe in his paper “Theory and practice of the g-index,” Scientometrics, Vol. 69, No 1 (2006), pp. 131-152. It is defined as follows: ‘Given a set of articles] ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received (together) at least g² citations.’ It aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to highly-cited articles.” [Publish or Perish User’s Manual, accessed online 30 January 2009]