Bibliometrics are the effort "to shed light on the process of written communication and of the nature and course of a discipline (in so far as this is displayed through written communication), by means of counting and analyzing the various facets of written communication." Alan Pritchard.
As our guide to the world of Bibliometrics, we refer to Roemer and Borchardt's 2015 book Meaningful Metrics, which breaks down the concept into four levels.
This is a simple, but vital, metric that simply measures how many times a single article or work has been cited. Finding this number depends on which database or search engine you prefer, and it often helps to use multiple sources to find a comprehensive view of how many times an article has been cited. The most commonly used sources are:
Web of Science and Scopus largely look at journal citations, so works such as books, posters, data sets, etc., will go uncited on these platforms. Google Scholar, on the other hand, will find a more wide-range of citations, but it won't find articles or citations of a certain age. Using all three can provide a better look at a single articles citation count.
Individual author output is another measure-able point of data and generally refers to an author's body of work over time. Some tools to identify an author's overall bibliometric score are as follows -
Group or institution-based bibliometrics are more difficult to measure, and there have not been many tools developed yet that do this work for us. Researchers and institutions will often cobble together a blend of author-level and journal-level metrics in order to glean more information about institution-level metrics. There are a few tools that assist in this endeavor, while we'll list below -
Venue level metrics involve those journals in which an article is published. Prestigious and well-known journals, like the New England Journal of Medicine or Nature, will have what is referred to as a high "impact factor." Impact factor is a calculation based on the average number of citations of citable articles in the journal in a given amount of time (often a three year period). Some other metrics to consider when looking at the venue-level:
