You wrote and posted/published your work. Now you want to track its impact in the scholarly community. Is anyone reading, discussing, or citing it?
There are numerous tools to measure your scholarly impact. This handout covers those suited to legal scholars, including Google Scholar, Web of Science, SSRN, and Hein Online.
You wrote and posted/published your work. Now you want to track its impact in the scholarly community. Is anyone reading, discussing, or citing it?
There are numerous tools to measure your scholarly impact. This handout covers those suited to legal scholars, including Google Scholar, Web of Science, SSRN, and Hein Online.
You wrote and posted/published your work. Now you want to track its impact in the scholarly community. Is anyone reading, discussing, or citing it?
There are numerous tools to measure your scholarly impact. This handout covers those suited to legal scholars, including Google Scholar, Web of Science, SSRN, and Hein Online.
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
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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
3 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
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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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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