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Metrics for grant applications and promotions

Find and use metrics to provide evidence of your track record and top papers

Find your top publications

Your publication's metrics are demonstrated by:

  • how many citations it has
  • how quickly the citations have accrued
  • citations still accruing if the paper is 10+ years old, indicating longevity and importance of the work.

Compare your publications to work of a similar age, subject area or journal to decide what your top papers are. For publications in:

You can also analyse how each of your publications are performing relative to the field, in both the SciVal (Scopus indexed publications) and InCites (Web of Science indexed publications) databases. 

It is important to note that there may be other reasons (beyond citation metrics) as to why a paper may be significant within the field. For example, your publication may have attracted online attention which can be tracked via Altmetric and Plum Analytics. 

ESI Highly Cited Papers

Watch Using Web of Science to look for Highly Cited Papers and Hot Papers (YouTube, 2m16s)

Essential Science Indicators (ESI) identifies papers in the Web of Science Core Collection that are producing a lot of impact when compared to peers (papers in the same field, same publication date). If  your paper has been identified as a Highly Cited Paper or Hot Paper, you will see an icon next to your paper to designate this status. Note: A paper can be both Highly Cited and Hot. 



Highly Cited Papers are papers published in the last 10 years that are receiving the most citations (top 1%) when compared to peer papers (same field, same publication year).



Hot Papers are papers published in the last two years that are receiving the most citations (top 0.1%) in the most recent two-month period when compared to peer papers (same field, same publication date).

Note: Papers identified as Highly Cited or Hot can change over time, as the ESI database updates every 2 months. It is recommended that you check regularly for these papers, and take screenshots, recording the date of capture where relevant. 

Top papers in SciVal

  1. Follow the instructions outlined in Author performance metrics in SciVal - up to step 14
  2. Click the hyperlinked number under Scholarly Output to see a full list of your publications

  1. Click Export and then Export spreadsheet 
  2. Make sure the following publication metrics are selected as part of the export: 
    • Citations
    • Field-Weighted Citation Impact
    • Field-Weighted Outputs in Top Citation percentiles, per percentile

  1. Click Export to CSV or XSLX 
  2. Sort the publications by Field-Weighted Outputs in Top Citation Percentiles, per percentile, to see the publications ranked by performance. Note: A publication in the 1st percentile, is in the top 1% compared to similar papers of same age, type and subject area. 

Tips: 

  • Check the citation count to see if the paper can logically be labelled as one of your top papers i.e. a paper published in the last year with only 2 citations may not have had enough time to have had performance value
  • Check the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) - a value above 1 indicates a paper is performing above world average 

Example statement: My article xyz is in the top 2% of all articles in its subject category and year with a FWCI of 3.5 (SciVal, July 2022).

Top papers in InCites

  1. Follow the instructions outlined in Author performance metrics in InCites 
  2. Click Baselines in the left hand side menu and click +Add under Baseline for All Items 

  1. To view performance metrics for each paper you've authored, click on the Web of Science Documents count in the table, next to "Baseline for All Items"

This will open an overlay that shows a list of all your documents and the metrics calculated for each document in the list. You can download the table to a CSV file. 

Note: You can use the Percentile in Subject Area indicator to sort publications from highest to lowest percentile. Publications in the 99th percentile, are in the top 1% for their subject area. The lowest percentile value is 0, indicating that a paper has received 0 citations. 

Example statement: "My article xyz is in the top 2% of publications in its subject area, with a CNCI of 3.5 (InCites, July 2022)."

Your papers rank in a research topic

  1. Search for the main topic related to your research work eg. "knee pain"
  2. Refine your topic search by country and/or years  
  3. Sort the result list by citation count
    • Do any of your papers appear towards the top of the list?
    • How many publications have you contributed to your topic?
    • Are you one of the most prolific authors who publish papers on that topic in Australia? View the list of authors in refine search.

Example statement: "For the year 2016, I have the 1st and 3rd highest cited papers on the topic of "knee pain" published with an Australian institution in the address (Web of Science topic search = "knee pain", 2016, 1/12/2021)"