In the main there are 4 major sources of bibliometric information. These are Scopus, The Web of Science, Dimensions and Google Scholar. Individual publishers can also provide some metrics.
Scopus
- Scopus is an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. It indexes over 23,000 peer-reviewed journals, 850 book series and conference papers from 120,000 worldwide events.
- Scopus is the data source for both the Times Higher Education University Rankings and the QS University Rankings
- SciVal is a web based analytics solution that uses Scopus data to for visualizsng the performance of research publications.
- Both Scopus & SciVal are products from Elsevier the education publishing company
Web of Science
- Web of Science is an abstract and citation database which includes 21,100 peer-reviewed, high-quality scholarly journals published worldwide in over 250 sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities disciplines. Conference proceedings and book data are also included.
- Web of Science is the data source for the Shanghai University Rankings
Dimensions
- A multidisciplinary source that includes citation data from CrossRef
- the field and relative citation ratios, and other indicators from Altmetric.
Google Scholar
- Google Scholar is useful for interdisciplinary and international coverage because it tracks all types of scholarly publications on the internet. It is not a curated database and the methods of collection and inclusion are not openly available.
- Google Scholar only offers basic metrics.
