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Measuring Scholarly Research Impact: Visualizing Tools for Bibliometric Networks

This guide talks about tools on assessing the impact of scholarly research, with explanations of terminology.

Visualization and Mapping

Visualization & Analytics Tools

          Read more the illustration by University of Illinois Chicago.

  • CitNetExplorer

    CitNetExplorer is a free software tool for visualizing and analyzing citation networks of scientific publications.  This tool imports citation data directly from the Web of Science database and drills down to identify clusters of closely related publications.

            Read more the illustration by University of Illinois Chicago.

Literature Mapping & Discovery Tools

  • Litmaps

    Litmaps creates interactive literature maps based on your search criteria and analyzes the citation patterns of the articles you selected.

Other Tools

Tools to retrieve data from Google Scholar for citation analysis:

Scholarometer is "a social platform to facilitate citation analysis. You provide author field annotations, and our tool uses this crowdsourced data to evaluate the impact of an author's publications. Our impact metric can be compared across fields. Install the browser extension to use Scholarometer" by Indiana University.


Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations from external data sources for citation data, then it analyzes and presents a range of citation metrics, including the number of papers, total citations and the h-index.