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You may have heard of something called DORA, or the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. In 2012, a group of cell biologists met in San Francisco and developed a set of recommendations centred around the responsible use of metrics with regards to research assessment.

At it's heart, DORA advocates for journal based metrics, such as the Journal Impact Factor, to be phased out of use completely in situations that involve the assessment of an individual. This will eventually effect processes relating to funding, appointment and promotion, and there is much work happening currently to make these changes. 

You can access journal level and other metrics via several sources, and it is recommended you use the Scopus database.

Different databases may give a different citation counts for the same entity and this is due to differences in indexing. In general, Scholar indexes everything regardless of quality, whereas Scopus and Web of Science are both curated indexes of research publications, with Scopus indexing slightly more content overall. Publish or Perish has the ability to aggregate all sources of citation data.

For further help please contact Joanne Fitzpatrick, Research Data Manager: j.fitzpatrick2@lancaster.ac.uk