When conveying the quality of your research output, metrics about individual articles can add context and allow you to highlight significant publications. The key is to draw on various forms of information and make a case for the importance of your work while situating it within your discipline.

Research metrics are often framed around rigor, prestige, and influence. Rigor—which may be derived from the stringency of the publication review and acceptance process—and prestige—which may be derived from the overall value of a journal—are both used to justify the importance of published articles. If you are looking for journal-focused metrics, go to the journals page of this guide. Prestige of an article may be tied to authorship (e.g., Are you the first author or solo author? Is a prominent figure in your discipline a co-author?). You can look to citation ratios that are normalized and/or weighted as an indicator of the prestige of an article. Researchers can also use alternative metrics to indicate the influence (e.g., social media posts) and prestige (e.g., interviews with mainstream news) of a particular publication. Citation count is the most common metric used to communicate the impact or influence of a single article. See the articles subpages for information on how to gather citations counts and alternative metrics using various tools. The table below provides an overview of what article metrics are available and where you can access them. 

References

Wadham, R. Assessing the quality of scholarly communication. https://guides.lib.byu.edu/ld.php?content_id=17215680

West, R. E., & Rich, P. J. (2012). Rigor, impact and prestige: A proposed framework for evaluating scholarly publications. Innovative Higher Education, 37(5), 359–371. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-012-9214-3

Other general references about article metrics:

http://www.lagotto.io/plos/

https://sparcopen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/SPARC-ALM-Primer.pdf