Citation-Based Metrics Tools
McMaster has access to three databases* that track article citation counts:
- Overton This link opens in a new windowOverton is an index of policy documents, guidelines, think tank publications and working papers. It collects data from 188 countries and over a thousand sources worldwide and is continually updating. The company parses each document, finding references, people and key concepts, and then links them to the relevant news stories, academic research, think tank output and other policy, allowing authors to search these documents and see where their ideas, papers, reports and staff are being cited or mentioned. Overton can help authors discover where their work is influencing or changing practice in the real world.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new window Coverage: 1976- (May vary by Index) Core collection consists of five separate multidisciplinary citation indexes that can be searched independently or in combination. •Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) •Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI) •Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) •Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Science (CPCI-S) •Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH) Indexes cited references per year from over 8,000 scholarly journals. It contains bibliographic information on all types of documents appearing in journals including articles, citations, letters, corrections, additions, excerpts, editorials and reviews.
*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
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Using Author Search
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Article-Level Metrics
Calculating citation-based metrics for a single article.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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.
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.