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Metric sources

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Research metrics can be drawn from a wide range of sources, and the most appropriate choice will depend on the question you are trying to answer and the conventions of your discipline. The following provides an overview of the most commonly used sources.

1. Subscription databases

Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions are among the largest subscription databases, covering thousands of peer-reviewed sources. They offer extensive bibliometric data, including citation counts, collaboration networks, publication venues, and author affiliations. UiT subscribes to Web of Science which can be accessed through Oria.

Advantages Limitations
  • provide curated and relatively consistent bibliographic and citation data

  • offer extensive coverage of scholarly publications, particularly journal articles

  • support advanced benchmarking of authors, research groups, and institutions
  • coverage of books, book chapters, and conference proceedings is more limited, which can disadvantage disciplines where these outputs are important

  • coverage can favour Western and English-language scholarship, potentially underrepresenting research from other regions and languages

  • different databases index different sources, so metrics can vary between databases

  • author and publication records can contain errors or misattributions, particularly when authors use name variations across publications – misattributions can be reported directly with the database provider; linking a ORCID iD to research profiles helps minimise these inaccuracies

Read more about all the academic databases offered at UiT

2. Open Access Bibliographic Databases

Open-access databases provide free and transparent access to bibliographic metadata and research metrics. OpenAlex, launched in 2021, is one of the largest open databases, cataloguing metadata for over 300 million publications, second in scale only to Google Scholar. It covers a broad range of bibliometric data, including citations, author contributions, institutional affiliations, research topics, open access status, and more.

Other notable platforms include OpenAIRE, which focuses on European research outputs and open-access publications; SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), a major database for Latin American, Portuguese, and Spanish research that is often underrepresented in subscription databases; and CORE, which aggregates millions of open-access articles from repositories worldwide.

Advantages Limitations
  • freely accessible, allowing data to be downloaded, reused, and analysed without subscription fees

  • support transparency and reproducibility by making bibliographic data more accessible

  • can provide broader coverage of disciplines, regions, languages, and publication types that may be underrepresented in commercial databases
  • metadata can be incomplete or inconsistent across records

  • less extensive curation can affect data quality and reliability for some types of analysis

  • coverage and data quality can vary between platforms and research areas

NVA - The Norwegian Research Information Repository

NVA differs from the citation databases described above. While researchers use it to register their publications and institutions rely on it to report outputs for funding purposes, its core function is literature registration, compliance, and institutional accountability, not citation tracking or bibliometric analysis. As a system designed specifically for Norwegian institutions, it is not a tool for international benchmarking and should not be used as a substitute for the databases described on this page.

Read more about NVA

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Questions?

For questions about publication data, assistance with your own bibliometric analysis, or advice on managing researcher profiles and improving the visibility of your research, email us at forskning@ub.uit.no.

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