Article Evaluation

Web of Science

Web of Science is a subscription-based database that allows finding the number of times works indexed in Web of Science cite a particular article. Next to each record/document in the search results page, you can see the number of citations under the 'Citations' value. Citation counts are also available on the full document page.

Scopus

Scopus is a subscription-based database from the Elsevier group. It includes peer-reviewed journal articles, commercial publications, series, books, conference papers, and patents. It allows tracking citation counts of publications indexed in Scopus. To find the citation count of a specific article, search for the article by its title or keywords under Document Search. The citation count will appear under the Citations page in the search results. Alternatively, citation counts are also available in the document details for each document indexed in Scopus. On this page, you can also see the Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) value. The Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) measures how much a publication is cited compared to similar publications. It can be used to benchmark the performance of the article against other articles (even in different subject areas) because it is normalized.

This value is also available to those without a subscription to Scopus/Scival (Bar-Ilan does not have a subscription to Scopus/Scival).

Meaning of the FWCI Value:

• An FWCI value of 1 means the publication has an equal impact to similar other publications.
• An FWCI value of >1 means the publication is cited more than similar publications. For example, an FWCI of 2.10 means it is cited 2.1 times more than the average.
• An FWCI value of <1 means the publication is cited less than similar publications. For example, an FWCI of 0.85 means it is cited 15% less than the average.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is Google's free search engine. It indexes the full text of various types of publications, including non-research publications such as pre-prints, theses, presentations, and more, which are not indexed in databases like Scopus and Web of Science. To get the citation count for a selected article, search for the article by its title or keywords. The citation count will appear under the "Cited by" value. Clicking on "Cited by" will lead to a list of articles that cited the given article.

Lens.Org

Lens.Org is a free search platform by the Cambia social enterprise for finding research articles and global patents. The platform provides citation count metrics at the article level and offers a wide range of search fields and tools for visualizing bibliometric data. Additionally, it is possible to identify patents that cite a selected article. 
On the website, you can find guides explaining how to use the platform.

Dimensions

Dimensions is a free database from Digital Science and other companies, providing various citation count metrics at the article level and Altmetrics. On the information page of a selected publication, you can get information about publications, patents, clinical trials, datasets, and policy documents that cited the article and the grants that funded the research.

Free registration is required to access the database. The free account is limited to searching publications and datasets. Searching information about grants, patents, clinical trials, policy documents, and reports requires payment.

Advantages

• Accurate Impact Assessment: They provide a more accurate assessment of the specific research impact, unlike journal-level metrics that may obscure variability between articles. They allow identifying influential articles even if published in lower-ranked journals.
• Encourages Transparency: They encourage transparency and allow researchers to demonstrate the impact of their work more detailedly in funding applications and academic evaluations.

Disadvantages

• Bias Towards Older Articles: Citation metrics may be biased towards older articles that have had more time to accumulate citations and do not necessarily reflect the quality or innovation of current research.
• Article Type Influence: Citation metrics may be influenced by the type of articles. Review articles may be cited more than research articles.
• Field Comparison Difficulty: There is difficulty in comparing articles from different fields due to differences in citation and publication patterns. Articles in certain fields tend to accumulate more citations naturally.
• Self-Citations and Negative Citations: Metrics may be influenced by self-citations or negative citations (criticism of the research), which do not necessarily reflect positive impact. The _scite database allows categorizing citations according to the nature of the reference: Supporting, Mentioning, and Contrasting.
• Database Differences: There are differences in metrics between different databases depending on their calculation methods and coverage (including the languages indexed in the databases).