Article-level metrics 

Citation analysis helps researchers assess the impact or "quality" of an article by counting the number of times other authors mention it in their work. No single tool is available to track citation data. The following tools are often used: 

Web of Science (WoS) – Provides an analysis of the total number of times a publication has been cited by other WoS publications. WoS also provides a “Usage Count” reflecting the number of times a document has been clicked on to view the full-length article or to save/export the bibliographic record. Users can also create Citation Reports for groups of records.  

Google Scholar – Provides a score reflecting the number of times an article has been cited using the “Cite” function associated with each record. 

Journal-level metrics  

Impact factors provide a measurement of the frequency that the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. Impact factors are used as a proxy to determine the importance of a journal within its field.

FAO staff has access to Journal Citation Reports (JCR), a tool that uses WoS citation data to derive impact factors for WoS-indexed journals.    

Author-level metrics  

h-index – An index that attempts to quantify both the productivity (number of publications) and impact (number of citations) of a researcher in one score, as a means to assess researcher performance. Both Web of Science and Google Scholar provide h-Index scores.  

i10-index – Is a score devised by Google Scholar that reflects how many of an authors’ articles have 10 or more citations. 

These metrics are useful for comparing researchers of a similar career length, field, and subject-specialty, who publish in similar journals. They are not useful for comparing researchers from different fields as citation patterns vary widely across disciplines. Researchers who tend to publish in books and conference proceedings rather than peer-reviewed journal articles may also have different types of scores.