Exploring impact metrics

Scaling Science Explore is a tool for exploring different measures of the impact of an article. It currently is running over papers in a single subdiscipline. Feedback is welcome.

Available metrics

Focusing on citations of a given paper

• Citations

• Impact (node centrality in the citation graph)

Focusing on the authors (averaged over all authors / first author)

• h-index

• Total author citation count (per paper, per year)

• Author experience (years since first publication)

Focusing on coauthors

• # of Recent coauthors

• Coauthor pagerank (in coauthorship graph)

Other

• Total journal citation count

Questions

• What other metrics do people regularly use to track and estimate impact?

  • There are some graph-wide measures that require the context of a full citation graph rather than the local vicinity of what points to or is pointed to by a document.

• What policy questions hinge on these or other metrics?

• For a given measure, how else might it be aggregated? (averaging across journals, contexts, networks, timescales)