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Research Metrics

This guide discusses the common metrics that are used to measure the impact of research. It also introduces the researcher to Scopus: a bibliometric tool that can be used to analse research impact at journal, article and author levels.

Document metrics

Document metrics are used to quantify the impact of published work, these include articles, conference proceedings, book chapters and more. In Scopus, these metrics include:

  • Citation count; Shows the total number of times the document has been cited in Scopus.
  • Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI); Shows how well the document is cited when compared to similar documents. This takes into consideration, the year of publication, document type as well as disciplines associated with its source. A value greater than 1.00 means the document is more cited than expected. FWCI is calculated by dividing the number of citations a publication received by the average number of citations to publications in a database, published within the same year, of the same type and within the same subject category.
  • Percentile benchmark; Shows how citations received by the document compare with the average for similar documents.
  • PlumX metrics; provides insights on how the users interact with the publication.

Example of Article Metrics

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