In academia, it’s common to hear questions about the importance of an article, the quality of a journal, the prominence of a researcher, or the impact of their work. These questions about scholarly significance are easy to pose but challenging to answer — indeed, answering them well requires a deep and nuanced understanding of the field or subfield in question, as well as an awareness of one’s own limitations and biases.

Not surprisingly, there is widespread desire for quicker, easier ways to address these questions. In particular, there are attempts to answer them numerically — to reduce complex evaluations to simple calculations, or “research metrics.” Most research metrics are based on citation counts and thus provide very limited insights into research quality and impact. Nevertheless, research metrics are commonly used in the evaluation of articles, journals, and authors, so it is important to understand how they are calculated, what exactly they do and do not say, and when and how to look beyond them.

This section covers:

• Article Metrics (citation counts)
• Journal Metrics (Journal Impact Factor and SCImago Journal Rank)
• Author Metrics (h-index)
• Inequities in Citation & Metrics
• Advancing Equity
   

Icon credit: metrics by Danang endar from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)