Scholars want to know and show the impact of their work, and there are a variety of ways to measure research impact. This page contains resources on understanding research impact metrics.
Some metrics are freely accessible online. Many metrics are accessed through databases such as Web of Science or Scopus, which may be available on site at WRLC partner libraries, and OpenAlex.
A free and open catalog of scholarly papers, authors, institutions, and more. It is considered an alternative to Web of Science and SCOPUS.
The purpose of OpenAlex is to catalog publication sources, author information, and research topics. It also shows connections between these data points to provide a comprehensive, interlinked view of the global research system.
OpenAlex contains extensive metadata across scientific works, authors, publication venues, institutions, and concepts. It includes metadata for 209 million works such as journal articles and books; 13 million authors with disambiguated identities; metadata for 124,000 venues that host works, including journals and online repositories; metadata for 109,000 institutions; and 65,000 concepts from Wikidata, which are algorithmically linked to works using an automated hierarchical multi-tag classifier.