Measuring Researcher Impact in the Environmental Science Field

Bibliometrics is an important aspect of determining the research impact of a scientific article. Although the research impact of an article can be measured in several ways, citation counts are a popular and straightforward metric to determine the number of times a research article is cited in another article or book. In the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, Scopus and Google Scholar are two tools that can be used to determine citation counts. However, the extent to which Google Scholar and Scopus index policy citation counts of STEM articles is unknown. This research compares the citation counts of 25 environmental science scholarly articles from five different authors across Google Scholar, Scopus, and a policy database called Overton. By identifying the citation count differences between the three tools to identify gaps in citation count metrics, this study concludes that Overton overwhelmingly identifies policy citation counts that are not found by Google Scholar or Scopus and thus is an important database to consider when analyzing citation counts in the environmental science field. This finding is significant because determining scientific articles’ impact in the policy field demonstrates how scientific literature can make real world impacts.