LibGuides: Copyright and Plagiarism: Publishing

Track Author/Article Impact

Authors and researchers can track the impact of their publications using free online tools. An author's impact can be measured and demonstrated by traditional citation analysis: how many other researchers cite the author's work or by altmetrics: how much the author's work is viewed, saved, and discussed online.

Citation Analysis

Citation Counts/Citation Analysis: an author or article's impact can be assessed by finding out the number of times other authors cite the original author's works.

Free citation analysis tools are listed below.

Google Scholar
Create a profile using your Google account. The list of articles written by you captured by Google Scholar will be generated and used to provide your h-index.
Publish or Perish
From Harzing.com: Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following metrics:
-Total number of papers and total number of citations -Average citations per paper, citations per author, papers per author, and citations per year -Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
-Egghe's g-index -The contemporary h-index -Three variations of individual h-indices -The average annual increase in the individual h-index -The age-weighted citation rate -An analysis of the number of authors per paper.
The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting into other applications) or saved to a variety of output formats (for future reference or further analysis). Publish or Perish includes a detailed help file with search tips and additional information about the citation metrics.

IRSC/Open Access Databases with limited Citation Counts

EBSCO CINAHL Complete This link opens in a new window
CINAHL Complete is the definitive research tool for nursing and allied health professionals. With CINAHL Complete users get fast and easy access to top nursing and allied health journals, evidence-based care sheets and quick lessons.

PubMed Central
PubMed Central is an open access database maintained by the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine.

EBSCO Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Academic Search is a monthly indexing service. It was first published in 1997 by EBSCO Publishing in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Its academic focus is international universities, covering social science, education, psychology, and other subjects.

Altmetrics

Altmetrics: alternative metrics that demonstrate an article or author's impact with qualitative data about storage, links, bookmarks, conversations, and media mentions online.

Some tools to track your altmetrics are listed below.

Academia.edu
From Academia.edu's About page: Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research.
Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. 46,803,108 academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding 17,180,480 papers and 1,994,738 research interests. Academia.edu attracts over 36 million unique visitors a month.
Altmetric
From Altmetric: Track and demonstrate the reach and influence of your work to key stakeholders. Tools for researchers include 1) the Altmetric Bookmarklet: this free browser plug in let’s you instantly see the Altmetric data for any publication with a DOI. Click on the donut to view the full details page for each output.; 2) Altmetric badges: enable you to showcase the online attention surrounding your research, and it’s free to embed them in your individual profile or publications page in just a few simple steps.; and 3) Altmetric API: free to use for research purposes! You can use it to query our entire database (which currently contains attention data for over 4 million research outputs).
Impactstory
From Impactstory: Discover the online impact of your research. Track buzz on Twitter, blogs, news outlets and more: we're like Google Scholar for your research's online reach.
PLOS
From PLOS: Article-Level Metrics (ALMs) are quantifiable measures that document the many ways in which both scientists and the general public engage with published research. Traditional metrics, which consider only citation count and journal name to assess impact, capture a narrow view of a work’s value and do so only after the accumulation of citations in academic literature. The power of ALMs lies in their ability to assess impact before the accrual of academic citations, incorporate both academic and social metrics, and reflect changing influence of a work over time.
Plum Analytics
Plum Analytics categorizes metrics into five separate categories: Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media, and Citations.
SlideShare
Share presentation slides and documents. SlideShare includes analytics.

Sherpa/Romeo

Sherpa/Romeo Website
An independent website that lists a journal's terms of OA and fees associated with publishing OA. Also gives the ISSN, the last updated date, and a color coded table of self-archiving ability. Sherpa/Romeo was established in 2004 and as of 2016 has over 2,200 journals indexed in its database. If you cannot locate a journal title you can search by publisher name. If you wish to suggest a journal for inclusion you can do so through the website.

Whitelist of Open Access Publishers and Journals

Rather than tell you those that are bad, you can use these websites to find open access journals that have received a mark of approval.

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
The OASPA requires a minimum amount of criteria be met by a journal or publisher to join. The criteria is a sign for authors to evaluate a member for being truly open access, as well as scholarly, non-predatory, and utilizing respected practices for publishing material. Membership can be revoked if a member fails to comply with these criteria.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
The DOAJ reviewed all its journals in 2014 and awarded those that meet specific criteria in openness, level of peer-review, and transparency standards a DOAJ Seal. The green tick means the journal was accepted into the DOAJ after 2014 when they reviewed their standards for inclusion.

Beyond Beall's List

Scholarly communications librarian, Jeffery Beall, maintained a very popular and well-respected "blacklist" of open access journals and publishers suspected of being predatory. That list was recently taken down. You can read more about it in this article from the Association of College and Research Libraries. When searching for a reputable open access journal or publisher, it is recommended to consult the DOAJ and OASPA websites listed above.

SPARC Author Addendum

Addendum to Publication Agreement

SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is an organization made up of over 200 American and Canadian libraries. Its mission is "to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education." SPARC members "use the resources and support provided by SPARC to actively promote Open Access to scholarly articles, the open sharing of research data, and the creation and adoption of Open Educational Resources on their campuses."

SPARC urges authors to retain their copyrights by using the Addendum to Publication Agreement (linked above) when making agreements with publishers. Authors do not have to sign publisher's Publishing Agreements or Copyright Transfer Agreements without making changes or attaching an addendum.

Visit the SPARC website to learn more.

Learn about copyright and publishing contracts from the Columbia Law School.

Learn more about author's rights and how to retain yours by visiting this Author's Rights Research Guide created by the University of Illinois at Chicago.