Subject Guides: Veterinary Science: Research visibility

Research visibility

Universities must increase the visibility of their research to demonstrate the contribution they make to the knowledge economy, improve their chances in the competition for research funding and position themselves in the global research landscape. It is therefore important to publish your work where you know it will be visible and have an impact.

Databases such as Clarivate Analytics’ Journal Citation Reports and Elsevier’s Scopus offer various metrics and functionalities to compare the value and impact of journals. Google Scholar also provides citation metrics for journals.

Clarivate Analytics’ Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
Allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from approximately 12,000 scholarly and technical journals and conference proceedings from more than 3,300 publishers in over 60 countries.
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One should not depend solely on citation data in journal evaluations. Citation data are not meant to replace informed peer review. Careful attention should be paid to the many conditions that can influence citation rates such as language, journal history and format, publication schedule, and subject specialty.

The following performance indicators are included for journals in the JCR:

Total Cites
Journal Impact Factor
Journal Impact Factor without self-citations
5-Year Impact Factor
Immediacy Index
Cited Half-Life
Citing Half-Life
Eigenfactor Score and
Article Influence Score

All journals indexed by Thomson Reuters Web of Science are divided into specific Web of Science subject categories. Journals within these categories are then ranked according to Impact factor to indicate journals with the highest impact in the field. An indication of the quartile in which the journal falls is also indicated.

Performance indicators for journals in the JCR

Scopus has been a data source for deriving many bibliometric indicators and related analytical tools for measuring performance of journals. The “compare sources” functionality gives a graphic display of up to ten selected journals at a time that contain the following indicators:

Scimago Journal Rank indicator (SJR)
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)
Cite Score (Elsevier's equivalent of the Impact Factor)
Citations
Documents
Percentage not cited by year
Percentage review documents by year

Scopus’ Compare journals functionality
A detailed discussion on the different indicators

Different databases offer different functionalities to determine citation patterns and rankings. Graphs and maps are usually available for better visualisation.

Comparisons between the citation results of different databases should be done with care as date ranges and source material upon which the results are based differ between databases. A search on more than one database such as Web of Science and Scopus should be done to get more accurate results. Google Scholar metrics also provides a different picture.

Citation analysis within Web of Science
Web of Science is the original citation research source and one of the most interdisciplinary and most comprehensive citation resources available. Web of Science extracts the citation information from the articles in over 6,000 journals from almost every discipline.
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Web of Science’s Citation reports and Citation maps can be displayed after an author, topic or journal search. Citation reports created within Web of Science supplies information such as Sum of Times Cited, Times Cited without self-citations, Citing articles, Citing articles without self-citations, Average cites per item and H-Index. Citation activity and trends are displayed graphically.
Citation Maps create a visual representation of citation relationships. One can track an article’s cited and citing references through two generations to discover an article’s wider relationships.
A “Cited reference search” can also be done to determine the citations for a specific article.
H-Index
The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications.
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The h-index was developed by the physicist Jorge E. Hirsch and is an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar or a group of scientists. A researcher has an h-index of 10 if 10 of their papers have been cited at least 10 times. The h-index is often used as a component or metric in the ranking of higher education institutions and their staff.
The h-index may have different values in the different databases and in Google Scholar due to the following reasons:
• Differences in the depth of coverage. Web of Science has an excellent depth of coverage (1910- ) which will result in a higher H-Index for researchers who have been publishing for a long time while Scopus does not have complete citation information for articles published before 1996. They are in the process of updating pre-1996 cited references going back to 1970 and h-index results may therefore increase over time.
• Differences in the width of coverage. Coverage of journal titles in Web of Science is not as wide as in Scopus. The regional coverage of Scopus is wider than Web of Science.
• Google Scholar’s metrics does not only cover journals, but also websites, grey literature, pre-prints and theses. It does not indicate the timescale covered and includes a lot of duplicate records for the same article.
Citation analysis within Scopus
A “Citation overview” for retrieved results can be displayed after an author, topic or journal search.
The citation overview gives a graphical presentation of citations per year to the references listed, the H-Index and a list of references with corresponding number of citations per year. Details of the citing publications for each reference can also be obtained.
Citation analysis within Google Scholar
Google Scholar Citations is another way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles.
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You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so it appears in Google Scholar results when other people search for you by name.
Citation metrics are computed and updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to your work on the web.
Google computes two versions, All and Recent, of three metrics - h-index, i10-index and the total number of citations. The i10-index is the number of publications with at least 10 citations.
To track books and book chapters, use Google Scholar and Google Books.
Google Scholar’s Scholarly Metrics
Google Scholar (GS) not only provides citation metrics for authors, it also provides citation metrics for academic journals.
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They arrange the metrics by different subject areas with subcategories. Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications in a specific area. They list the top 20 publications ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. To see which articles in a publication were cited the most and who cited them, click on its h-index number. The scholarly metrics for Veterinary Science is listed as a sub-category of the subject area “Health and Medical Sciences”

Most funding and rating institutions require the number of research contributions and citations counts per researcher. The National Research Foundation (NRF), for instance, requires an author to provide their Web of Science H-Index, Scopus H-index, Google Scholar profile, and Google citation profile. Author name ambiguity makes it extremely problematic to calculate these contributions.

To address this, several databases have developed solutions. Thomson Reuters launched the Researcher ID in 2008. Since 15 April 2019 the Web of Science ResearcherID is hosted on Publons where an author's peer review activity is also recorded. Scopus allocates an Author ID to each name form. Google Scholar provides a platform for profiles and citations. The different social media platforms, such as Research Gate, Academia.edu, and LindedIn all have their individual identifiers. ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) developed a hub that links to all of these identifiers. By using ORCID, the researcher only has to populate ORCID, and that information will then be pushed to all the other databases and social media platforms.

Summary of Author Identifiers
This table gives a brief overview of a few author identifiers which may assist in enhancing research visibility

More Information on ORCID