Tools
You can access and analyse research metrics data in several different resources. Find out more about what each tool offers.
The following tools are available to researchers at the University of Bristol. See below for details of which metrics can be accessed by each resource, and refer to Researcher metrics for information on how each metric should be applied.
For a full list of databases available to University of Bristol staff and students see the Library's A-Z Databases guide.
ORCID is a unique ID that links your research activity across different platforms, publishers, and institutions. It is a non-proprietary, institution-independent identifier that moves with the individual and is of value to all career stages. Sign up to ORCID through Pure to automatically link these systems, and remember to add your ORCID to your researcher profile in other systems such as Scopus and Web of Science.
Include your ORCID in grant applications, publications and research management tools such as Researchfish to automatically attribute your work to a single author profile.
The Overton database collects policy documents and tracks citations to academic literature. It can be used to demonstrate research impact outside academia by exploring citations to research outputs in publications from governments, universities, IGOs, NGOs, research funders, publishers and think tanks.
The University of Bristol has an institutional subscription to Overton - for information on how to access this database see the Library's A-Z Databases guide.
PlumX metrics measure online mentions of research outputs. These include traditional citations (from Scopus data), abstract views, library holdings, online reference manager captures, GitHub repository code forks, and mentions in Wikipedia, social media, blogs and the news.
PlumX metrics are available via Scopus, and are visualised via the Plum Print, which categorises mentions into five broad categories, each contributing to a different specific metric. For more information see https://plumanalytics.com/learn/about-metrics/.
Publish or Perish is a downloadable software package which can calculate a number of different research metrics, including document and citation counts, and h-index. By default, metrics are based on data from Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic, but as the Library subscribes to Scopus and Web of Science you can also import data from these sources.
The University of Bristol uses SciVal to analyse publication and citation data, based on information from Scopus. Through SciVal, you can access document and citation counts, h-index, Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), Scimago Journal Rank, journal CiteScore, Source Normalised Impact per Paper (SNIP), alternative metrics from PlumX, and visualise existing and potential collaboration networks.
The University's subscription to SciVal allows researchers to access benchmarking, collaboration and reporting modules, as well as a general overview module. See below for more information on using these modules, and contact lib-metrics@bristol.ac.uk for support and deskside training.
Overview
Use the ‘Overview’ module to view research performance summaries for Bristol or other research organisations, specific researchers or groups of researchers, or custom document sets. Visualise publication counts and impact indicators by SciVal-assigned subject areas or by defining a custom research area based on keywords.
Benchmarking
Compare performance of individual researchers, institutions and countries, or create your own custom document sets, research areas, and research groups.
Collaboration
Identify existing and potential collaborators at the individual or institutional level based on publications and citation impact in SciVal-assigned subject areas or by defining a custom research area.
Reporting
Create custom reports using outputs from any of the three modules, share them with colleagues (within SciVal), or save them for easy updating.
Publication and citation data is also available from Web of Science. Content coverage is broadly similar to Scopus, but the University does not subscribe to the analytics service for this database (InCites), so the information available will be less rich than that in SciVal. You can access document and citation counts, h-index, and Journal Impact Factors.
Tip: Link your ORCID to your Web of Science ResearcherID profile to improve the accuracy of metrics reported in Web of Science.