Possible statistics - individual publications

You may also wish to have statistics for individual publications, rather than as a grouped set.

Different statistics give an indication about different aspects of your work. Below you will find some suggestions. Note that the journal impact factor is not listed here. Many funders and institutions have signed DORA (e.g. Research Council of Norway, European Research Council), and no longer consider JIF appropriate for assessment of individuals - see module 2 page on journal-level metrics for more information.

Later pages in the module will cover how and where to find these statistics.

Table of possible statistics and what they indicate

Possible statistics	What does it indicate something about?	For which publication types are these most appropriate/reliable for?*
Number of citations Is it a highly cited paper? "Highly cited papers" in Web of Science1 Field citation ratio2 Usage statistics: Accesses/reads/downloads Sales, number of libraries holding the publication Downloads (of e.g. software, outreach publications)	Use of your works	Citations: Articles, books, chapters, conference proceedings, datasets, reports, policy documents, software/code, clinical guidelines Usage: Articles, books, chapters, conference proceedings, datasets, software/code, reports, policy, popular articles
Times cited in policy documents News or social media posts about the work Times cited in patents Total Altmetric Score and percentile (Altmetric)3	Societal contact, contribution to innovation	Citations in news/social media/policy, Altmetric: Articles, books, chapters, reports, popular articles Citations in patents: Articles, patents, conference proceedings

• • * Types in bold are where statistics should be available and relevant; for others, statistics are possibly relevant/available, but may have some limitations
  • ¹Highly cited papers in Web of Science are articles that are in the top 1 % in terms of number of times cited, compared to other articles of the same age and field.
  • ²The field citation ratio tells us how much a publication has been cited compared to publications of the same age and in the same field.
  • ³Altmetric is a service that tracks mentions in policy, patents, news and social media (amongst other things) and combines these into a total score. Note that the total score can be difficult to interpret the meaning of, as it is an aggregate of several things. See Module 2.
    

For more information about these statistics and Altmetric, see Module 2: About bibliometric indicators and statistics.