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Impact Factor / CiteScore - Bibliometrics

This is a guide to discovering the Impact Factor (Web of Science) or CiteScore (Scopus) for a journal or to discover the leading journals in a subject area.

SciVal (Elsevier)

SciVal

Whereas CiteScore and Impact Factor are measures of a journal's value relative to other journals, SciVal takes the metrics game to another level completely.  SciVal mines Scopus and other sources to provide metrics on virtually every aspect of individual, unit, and organizational output.

*Note* - SciVal is not the only platform to provide such information, competitors include Clarivate's InCites, Lens, and Snowball Metrics, to name a few.

To best understand what SciVal is, or what SciVal does, it may be best to frame the discussion by asking what sorts of questions SciVal can answer: 

  • Research planning: What are an institution's emerging, growing, and niche research areas? 
  • Benchmarking: How does an institution's performance compare to its peers? 
  • Collaboration: Who are potential research partners? 
  • Evaluation: What metrics can be used to evaluate the performance of researchers, departments, faculty, and institutions? 
  • Research impact: What is the broader impact of research programs on society? 
  • Talent identification: Who are the key contributors to priority research fields? 
  • Funding: What funding opportunities are available for an institution's research? Which research topics that are likely to be well funded?

To begin, let's look at how Case Western Reserve University's performance compares to other universities.

Using SciVal

First, you'll need to login to SciVal using your Case Single-Sign-On (SOS):

  1. Go to Cleveland Health Sciences Library (CHSL) home page.
  2. Click on the Databases tab in the lower part of your screen.
  3. Type in "SciVal" and click "Search."
  4. Click the link to SciVal. (This will initiate the Single-Sign-On authentication.)

Screenshot of SciVal Home Screen

When you're at SciVal, you will see a few things that ensure your credentials are working. The first, at the upper right will be a circle icon with your personal credentials (TH). The second, if you click on the icon of the acropolis, you'll see "Access Provided by Case Western Reserve University."  (If this is your first time using SciVal you should create a personal account, which will allow you to save searches to your personal account for access at a future date, or to allow alerts for any searches you save. If you've registered with Scopus or Embase, your account should work across all Elsevier platforms.)

Once you're all set on SciVal, you can take advantage of your access via CHSL and Case Western Reserve University to quickly see performance details about the university.  Per the above image, on the home page, at the bottom left, on the Explore "card," you'll see a link "Direct to Your Home Institution."  When you click this link, you'll see the SciVal page for Case Western Reserve University.

Screenshot of SciVal Case Western Reserve University home page

There is a lot of information provided on the institutional home page, and much of it will be unfamiliar to you if you've not used a platform like this before.  Let's look at the full Summary:

Screenshot of SciVal Case Western Reserve University Summary information

The default year range for the information provided, per the first Summary image, is 2019 - 2025, and information is provided from All Subject Areas.  Based on these details, we can see that the entire Scholarly Output is 32,350 articles by 16,384 authors with various citation count information.  This includes the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and the h-index.

Field-Weighted Citation Impact

Like Journal Impact Factor and CiteScore, the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) is a ratio.  The ratio indicates how the number of citations received by an entity’s publications compares with the average number of citations received by all other similar entity's publications in the data universe: how do the citations received by this entity’s publications compare with the world average?

  • To be more clear, a FWCI of Exactly 1 means that the output performs just as expected for the global average.
  • A FWCI greater than 1 means that the output is more cited than expected according to the global average. For example, 1.79 means 79% more cited than expected.
  • A FWCI less than 1 means that the output is cited less than expected according to the global average.

Additionally, Field-Weighted Citation Impact takes into account the differences in research behavior across disciplines. For instance, researchers working in fields such as medicine and biochemistry typically produce more output with more co-authors and longer reference lists than researchers working in fields such as mathematics and education; this is a reflection of research culture, and not performance.

H-Index

The h-index is a number intended to represent both the productivity and the impact of a particular scientist or scholar, or a group of scientists or scholars (such as a departmental or research group). 

The h-index is calculated by counting the number of publications for which an author has been cited by other authors at least that same number of times.  For instance, an h-index of 11 means that the scientist has published at least 11 papers that have each been cited at least 11 times. 

The h-index creates a "balancing" effect as it eliminates the skew that would be caused by an outlier publication.  For example, if an aging scientist published one paper decades ago that was cited 10,000 times, but has only published papers that have been cited 20 or 30 times each in the past decade, a straight citation count for that scientist could make it seem that his or her breadth of work was very significant.  The h-index, however, would be much lower, showing that the scientist's overall publication impact is not necessarily as significant.

Simply put, if an author's h-index is n, then the author has n publications that each have at least n citations, where n is as great as it can be. For example, if an author has five publications, with 9, 7, 6, 2, and 1 citations (ordered from greatest to least), then the author's h-index is 3, because the author has three publications with greater than or equal to 3 citations.

The H5-Index shown in the image is the same as the H-Index, but restricted to the last 5 years.

Publication by Subject Area

The Summary page in SciVal provides a broad, but overwhelming amount of data regarding the output of the organization.  This includes data about publication subject areas.  In this case, the data is presented as a pie chart. 

Screenshot of SciVal Case Publication Subject Area

The chart format can be changed, and more importantly, you can click on any "piece" of the pie to "drill down" and find more granular data.

Screenshot of SciVal Case Subject Area Detail Pie Chart

Research Topics

Further down the page are Research Topic Clusters which show the top subjects by Scholarly Output at the university. The Performance Indicators for the university include the Top Citation Percentiles, Top Journal Percentiles, and Most-Cited Publications.

Screenshot of SciVal Case Most cited publications

Summary

This is a general introduction to SciVal, specifically focused on the performance of Case Western Reserve University from 2019 - 2025 based on data retrieved from SciVal.  Other LibGuide sections will consider other data that can be gathered from SciVal.