Publication Metrics

The University of Sussex is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration On Research Assessment and commits to two key principles for assessing and evaluating research policy:

Principle 1: Research outputs and other research contributions will be evaluated on their intrinsic merit, rather than relying on inappropriate proxies and metrics such as the title or impact factor of the journal in which the research was published.

Principle 2: The quality of a researcher’s work will be evaluated in terms of a wide range of contributions beyond research publications, such as datasets, training of early-career researchers, and impacts on policy and practice.

Find out more about the University of Sussex’s commitment to DORA and its principles.

SciVal provides a tool to view and analyse publication and citation data for individual articles and authors. It is essential that all users of SciVal use the data and tools it provides appropriately and in line with University policy.

SciVal is a Research Intelligence Solution which allows users to view and analyse the publication and citation data within the Scopus database. Scopus citation and publication data underpins Times Higher Education and QS World University Rankings. You can use SciVal to:

• Visualise research performance: identify research strengths and interdisciplinary research areas through at-a-glance standardised reports and spotlight maps for institutions and countries.
• Benchmark and compare performance: of an institution, department, research group or custom group of researchers.
• Identify opportunities: Identify and analyse existing and potential collaboration and co-authorship opportunities across specific subject areas or self-defined research topics.
• Research Trends: Analyse the research trends of any Research Area with citation and usage data, to discover top performers and rising stars.

Citation impacts normalised by the field indicate how the number of citations received by a group of outputs compares to the average or expected number of citations received by other similar publications. Similar publications are determined by year, type, and discipline.

FWCI is calculated using citation data from Scopus, and can be explored using SciVal. It is one of the metrics that is used by The Times Higher Education World Rankings. 

The University of Sussex has a subscription to Altmetric.com's Institutional Explorer Dashboard. This allows users to both search the full Altmetric database, or to view altmetric data surrounding the research outputs of specific authors, research groups and departments at the University.

1. Always use quantitative metrics together with qualitative data, such as expert opinion or peer review.
2. Always use more than one quantitative metric to get the richest perspective.
3. If comparing entities, normalise the data to account for differences in subject area, year of publication and document type. Comparing authors based solely on their h-index or total citations is not a responsible use of metrics.