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Making an Impact: Tracking Your Research Metrics

Learn strategies for assessing the impact of your research with this step-by-step guide to research metrics

Citation-Based Metrics Tools

McMaster has access to two databases* that track article citation counts:

*These resources draw their data from different sources, so metrics may differ across them. Google Scholar is a less controlled database than Web of Science and its citation numbers are often inflated. For this reason, Web of Science is seen as a more reliable source for accurate metrics.

For a step-by-step guide to using each resource, see below:

Web of Science


Author-Level Metrics

Calculating metrics for the combined output of a given researcher or research group.

Please note, creating a Web of Science ResearcherID is the best way to ensure efficient and accurate retrieval of citation-based impact metrics.  For more information on setting up a ResearcherID, visit the Researcher Profiles page of this guide.

Using ResearcherID

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Using Author Search

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 


Article-Level Metrics

Calculating citation-based metrics for a single article.

Google Scholar


Author-Level Metrics

Calculating metrics for the combined output of a given researcher or research group.

Please note, a My Citations profile is necessary for calculating author-level metrics in Google Scholar. For information on setting up a My Citations profile, please visit the Researcher Profiles page of this guide.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 


Article-Level Metrics

Calculating citation-based metrics for a single article.

1) Search for the title of interest.

2) Beneath each result, you will see the number of times it has been cited by other articles in the Google Scholar database:

3) Click directly on the "Cited By" link to view a complete list of citing articles.