Research Metrics, or citation metrics, are traditionally developed to measure the impact of research outputs to the scholarly community. Computations of research metrics are primarily based on citation counts – how many times an article has been cited by other articles. As the citation counts can be aggregated for different levels such as articles, researchers, and journals, and normalized for comparison across different subjects, different types of research metrics are developed. Recently new research impact evaluation tools are evolved to complement the traditional citation metrics.
There has been a worldwide initiative on responsible use of research metrics. Researchers should be aware of the limitations of research metrics when using them for comparisons and decisions. For example, the publication type and frequency, author’s productivity, and the number of co-authors in an article, have significant effect on the research metrics. For more information on responsible use of metrics, please refer to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics.
