Division of Library Services

Metrics: the statistical analysis of texts and information, are being used as a measure of research impact or research influence of an individual scientist or research group. Metrics must always be considered in the context of your discipline. Citation patterns vary in different disciplines and metrics should never be used as the only measure, e.g. metrics + peer review.

You can use metrics to demonstrate your track record when applying for grants and promotion. If it is difficult to locate your publications, e.g. other authors share your name and initials; or inconsistent use of your name and initials, or mistakes in the database records; it may be useful to establish a unique identifier - see further information about Researcher ID and Author ID.

• Bibliometrics : broader term includes publication counts, citation analyses and content analyses
• Citation metrics : the statistical analyses of citation counts
• Web metrics: includes download counts and the number and type of hyperlinks to your publications

Citation analysis is a widely recognised bibliometric tool for assessing the quality of scholarly research.

Authors and researchers need to be aware of the advantages of consistency of their name when it is attributed to published material particularly when published online or in databases such as Scopus. Consistency of the use of an author's name will influence their citation count.

For more information see:

• Bibiometrics guide produced by Macquarie University
• Online tutorial for Researcher ID created by Thompson Reuters
• Journal metrics Factsheet produced by Scopus
• Scopus.com - How to calculate the h-index?

Scopus

Scopus has been selected to provide citation information for the 2012 round of the Australian Government's Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative.

Scopus is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for scholarly journal articles. It covers nearly 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers, including coverage of 16,500 peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical, medical and social sciences (including arts and humanities) fields. Coverage is from 1996 -.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.

Google Scholar displays citation counts for individual publications, with links to the source of the citation. Some citations may be incorrectly attributed, or be from questionable sources. Google Scholar does not differentiate between peer-reviewed or non peer-reviewed content.

Google Scholar Citations

Authors can set up a personal profile in Google Scholar Citations that '...keeps track of citations to their articles. 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 that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name’, and add a link to your Google Scholar profile in your email signature. For example, view the image below:

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  Click image to enlarge.

Publish or Perish

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyses academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyses these and presents a range of statistics.

The software and a further explanation can be found at: Publish of Perish.

Journal Citation Reports (JCR)

The journal impact factor is a popular metric used to compare journals in a particular field or discipline. It is a measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period.  To find the impact factor you can use the JCR database.

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is a comprehensive and unique resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from selected journals. It is the only source of journal impact factors. JCR can show you the:

• Most frequently cited journals in a field
• Highest impact journals in a field
• Largest journals in a field

• Journal Citation Report Help
• educational tutorial on Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
• Journal Citation Reports on the Web v.4.0

Web of Science

Web of Science includes:

• Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) --1899-present
• Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) --1898-present
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) --1975-present
• Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Science (CPCI-S) --1990-present
• Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH) --1990-present

These databases can be searched individually or together, and can be used to locate articles by a range of criteria. They can also be used to locate citing articles, i.e. articles that have cited a specific reference.

SCIMAGO JCR

SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a free and publicly available service that provides bibliometric analysis tools based on the information contained in the Scopus database.

Ulrich's

Ulrich's can be used to find peer reviewed journals in your discipline. It is particularly useful if your research is cross disciplinary and you are not familiar with key journals in relevant areas.

NB: This is not an exhaustive or complete collection. For more information about the journal you intend to publish in, visit the journals 'Information for Authors' section on their website.

For more information see the database summary on the Libraries Journal Databases page.

You may wish to consider publishing your work to an online journal, which is freely available and discoverable using search engines. Open access removes subscription barriers to access to your research outputs. Some open access journals have relatively high journal impact factors.

Different categories of open access include:

• Green Open access: upload the final accepted manuscript copy of your work to CRO (CSU Research Output). CRO staff will check and ensure compliance with copyright requirements.
• Gold open access: publishing in open access journals.

Directory of Open Access Journals

For material that is freely available you can search the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This is a service that covers free, full text, quality controlled, scientific and scholarly journals. The DOAJ supports peer reviewed scholarly articles, as detailed in the Best Practice Guide to Open Access Journal Publishing.

Other useful guides to open access publishing are available from the Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) List and the Australian Open Access Support Group.

• Open access explained. Phd Comics: What is open access?

Other Open Access repositories:

• OpenDOAR
• Registry of Open Access Repositories

Many journals use unique referencing styles, and Library faculty liaison staff are available to assist if you need to adapt a style, or change an existing style in EndNote to meet the requirements of a particular journal. Publisher's web sites will often have their Guidelines for Contributors or Authors detailing their requirements for word limits styles and document templates.

For further assistance contact your Faculty Liaison Librarian.

The Division of Library Services is responsible for issuing ISBNs for Charles Sturt University publications. To obtain an ISBN please email: acq@csu.edu.au with details of the publication including, title, date and author. The Library will log the details and issue you with an ISBN number.

Cataloguing-In-Publication can be requested from the National Library of Australia.

Should you require an ISSN for a new journal you must apply to the National Library of Australia.

Please note your legal obligations under Commonwealth and State Legal Deposit legislation.

The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a unique number or name that identifies digital content. Journal publishers will assign a DOI to full text journal articles when these are included in electronic journal collections or databases. Online publishers of full text journals will assign DOI to articles. Information about a digital object may change over time, including where to find it, but the DOI number or name will remain the same.

The APA Referencing is one of a number of referencing styles that include the DOI with reference details. EndNote X4 will import the DOI along with other bibliographic details.

A DOI search will resolve to the article on publishers websites. If users have subscription or institutional access to the electronic journal or database, they will be able to access the full text.

CRO stores and showcases the research publications of Charles Sturt University. CRO makes it easy for researchers all over the world to find and access the University's published research output using search engines such as Google, Google Scholar and the Australian National Library's Trove database.

CRO contains over 12,000 records including the full text of research articles, conference papers and other research outputs of CSU staff and students. Where the full text is unable to be included in CRO a bibliographic citation and abstract is provided. The CRO Policy outlines what can be submitted to CRO.

Before submitting publications to CRO please check to find out if they have already been added to the database. Click on the Advanced Search Tab and select particular fields such as author. Contact CRO administrators if you require assistance with this.

If you wish to change a record in CRO or identify which duplicated item for CRO administrators to remove, please use the Change Record Form.

CRO is the source of data for the annual HERDC collection. CSU researchers are required to submit their research publications to CRO each year. This collection is used to determine research funding for universities.

You can also set up a link to the list of your research included in CRO in your signature block.

The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative has been developed by the Australian Research Council. It assesses research quality within Australia's higher education institutions using a combination of indicators and expert review by committees comprising experienced, internationally recognised experts.

For more information about ERA, see: The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative on the Australian Government website.

Useful links:

• CRO: CSU Research Output
• CRO: CSU Research Output FAQ's
• ERA Newsletter (Australian Research Council)
• ERA journal list
  • Australian Research Council (ARC) 2012
  • Deakin University, School of Information Systems (John Lamp)
• Research codes (ANZSRC, FOR & SEO)