Track citations

Bibliometrics is used to determine the impact of research through the process of citation analysis. This quantitative approach is used in the evaluation of the performance of research done on an individual, institutional and global level.  

Citation analysis is the process whereby an article's impact or "quality" is assessed by counting the number of times other authors mention it in their work. The process involves counting the number of times an article is cited by other works to measure the impact of a publication or author. For a thorough analysis of the impact of an author or a publication, one needs to look in multiple databases, such as Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and other databases with limited citation data to find all possible cited references. Currently, the HSRC subscribes to the tool Scopus for tracking Citations. HSRC also has access to Google Scholar which provides citation count outside the scope of accredited journal articles which are mostly used to report towards unit self-reflection reports. eRKC extends the services to also cover Altmetrics which contains both traditional citation indexes such as Scopus and citations that help indicate societal impact.

Tracking of citations is used to determine the impact a particular article or author has had, by showing which other authors cited the work within their papers. Such information is useful to identify the latest research done in a specific subject field, to identify relevant articles to support research and to promote research collaboration on an individual and institutional level.  

The H-Index is one specific method utilizing citation analysis to determine an individual’s impact. An H-Index measures the number of research outputs produced against the citation impact of an author profile. If a researcher has an H-index of 5 it means at least 5 research articles have a citation count of 5 or higher.