Citation impact or citation rate is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}

Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics,^[7][8] specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis.

The importance of journals can be measured by the average citation rate,^[9][6] the ratio of number of citations to number articles published within a given time period and in a given index, such as the journal impact factor or the citescore. It is used by academic institutions in decisions about academic tenure, promotion and hiring, and hence also used by authors in deciding which journal to publish in. Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators.

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recognizes the need to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated.

There is a pressing need to improve the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated by funding agencies, academic institutions, and other parties.To address this issue, a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals met during the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in San Francisco, CA, on December 16, 2012. The group developed a set of recommendations, referred to as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment.

Read the Declaration

2025 DORA handbook

Access the DORA website

"Practicing responsible research assessment: Qualitative study of faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure assessments in the United States" (Interesting DORA member paper specific to the US context & research assessment)

 Citation searches may be conducted using the following databases:

Please contact the Library’s Faculty Services if you would like us to conduct a citation search for you.

   * This index for measuring a researcher’s impact was developed in 2005 by Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California in San Diego. The h-Graph displays the h-index for a single author, multiple authors, or a group of selected documents. The h-index is based on the highest number of papers included that have had at least the same number of citations. View Hirsch’s original paper.

 MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CITATION INDEXES AND ANALYSIS