Measure Research Impact and Quality

A citation report or analyse results report can always be generated from any list of results in Web of Science.

To do this you will need to find all available documents by the author in Web of Science.

Go to the Author Search screen by selecting the + More tab and then Author Search. 

From here enter in Author Name i.e. the surname and initials. You will have the option to add name variants if the authors name is likely to appear in varying forms in publications

Select Research Domain

You can select a research domain if you think it will assist with finding their publications – these can be broad subject areas or narrower subfields. This is optional but could help narrow the search if the author has a common name.

Select Organisation

You can select the organisation(s) the author is affiliated with currently with and in the past. This is optional but recommended as it is a good way to differentiate you from other authors with similar names. Once you have selected the correct research domains you can finish your search.

From the results screen you can generate a report straight away but check the top of the page for Article Groups. If the author’s publications are linked together with a Researcher ID they can be found as a group and are more likely to be a more complete and accurate list of the author's work. 

If you find that only some publications from a results list belong to the author you can add those to a marked list. You might find you need to do multiple searches to find all of an author's work if one search might not cover all of the variations of an authors name, in which case you can add the required results of different searches to the marked list. You can access all the documents in a marked list by going the icon in the top right corner of the screen and can produce a report from there.

If you are searching for your own publications in Web of Science you may wish to create a ResearcherID or an ORCID to link them together.

The citation report includes

• the total number of publications, citations and citing articles along with the totals without self citation
• an h-index and average number of citations per year
• a graph plotting the total number of publications per year or the sum of citations per year

• There will also be a list of all of the author's publications with the total and average citations for each along with the number of citations per year for the last five years but the list can be adjusted to display the annual citations for previous years
• By default the report will cover the whole time period over which the documents were published but this can be adjusted to a narrower time period
• The list can be sorted to display by publication date and by time cited
• The publications list with the citation data can be exported as a csv file to be viewed in Excel

Results Analysis will give you a breakdown of the number of publications using various criteria.

• This will include a visualisation of the data as a treemap or bar graph displaying the 5-25 top results which can be downloaded as a jpeg
• The data can also be displayed as a table including the numbers of publications and percentage of the total
• Results can be analysed in different ways including by Web of Science subject category, document type, source title and authors 
• Analysing by organisation or author could be useful if looking at collaboration, countries/regions if looking at international collaboration
• Records can be selected and excluded e.g. if looking at collaborating institutions the institution the author is currently at can be excluded 

The Analyse results tool can be used to analyse any set of results so can be used for purposes other than analysing the output of a single author.