Measuring Article Impact

Article-level metrics attempt to provide a snapshot of how an individual article is being discussed, shared, and used. Metrics can be drawn from many different places and can be traditional, citation-based metrics, or newer metrics such as altmetrics.

Many publishers and databases have their metrics platforms and ways of measuring article-level impact, for example, Public Library of Science (PLOS) and Springer.  Google Scholar, Dimensions, and Scopus all collect citation information.

Scopus goes one step further with PlumX metrics, producing a visualisation based on 5 categories - Usage (e.g. clicks, downloads, views, library holdings), Captures (e.g. bookmarks, code forks, favourites, watchers), Mentions (e.g. blog posts, comments, reviews, news media), Social Media (e.g. shares, likes, comments, tweets) as well as Citations. Similar data can be viewed through the Altmetric Bookmarklet.

Plum X Metrics - Scopus

A description of further article-level metrics, including details of limitations and use cases, can be found at The Metrics Toolkit.

Measuring Journal Impact

There are many metrics available at journal level, however, it is important not to conflate journal quality with article quality. For more information on journal impact,  see the How to get published page.

PubPeer

Pubpeer is a forum for open, public comment on publications. Comments should be based on publically verifiable information and are anonymous. Authors receive notification when publications are commented on and have a permanent right of reply. there is also a browser plug-in that alert users to PubPeer comments on any on-screen articles.