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To conduct bibliometric research and analysis

To identify bibliometric indicators and journal articles classified in the A-tier according to ANVUR.

Where to Find the Impact Factor of a Journal

The Impact Factor (IF) is a bibliometric index developed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1961. It measures the average number of citations received in a given year by articles published in a scientific journal during the preceding two years.

The IF is automatically calculated by the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which is accessible through the Web of Science database.
[Usage guide available].

Where to Find an Author’s H-index

The H-index, or Hirsch index, is a metric proposed by physicist Hirsch to quantify an author’s scientific output and impact. It is determined by the relationship between the number of published works and the number of citations received for each work.

An author’s H-index can be calculated using all major bibliographic and citation databases, including Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar.

Where to Find the List of ANVUR A-tier Journals

To locate the list of journals in Area 13 (Economics and Social Sciences) classified as A-tier by ANVUR:

  1. Access the dedicated ANVUR page and select Area 13 – A-tier Journals.
  2. Download the PDF containing the list of journals and, if needed, convert it to Excel for filtering purposes (various online tools are available, e.g., "I Love PDF").

Once you have extracted the list of A-tier journals of interest, connect to a bibliographic database such as Scopus or EBSCOhost’s Business Source Ultimate, conduct the necessary search, and filter the results by source journal.

This tutorial video can be helpful, starting at 1:44.

The following list presents a non-exhaustive selection of bibliometric research and analysis tools designed to support study, research, and the evaluation of scientific output, with particular emphasis on resources that are free or offer at least a free usage plan.

Intended for students, doctoral candidates, and researchers, these tools enable the identification and analysis of academic literature, the monitoring of its impact through citations, and the recognition of relevant journals, authors, and research areas. They facilitate effective navigation of scientific communication and support informed decision-making in academic and research contexts.

Link: https://www.scilit.com/

Business Model: Free

Brief Description

Scilit is a platform that aggregates scientific and academic content from multiple sources. It is developed and maintained by the open-access publisher MDPI AG and is offered free of charge. The platform collects and organizes publication data using automated methods and covers newly published content within hours or days.

Scilit includes journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and preprints.

Using the collected data, the platform provides several useful additional services:

  • Scilit Rankings: Rankings of leading publishers, journals, and countries based on the number of published articles.
  • Related Articles Widget: An algorithm that recommends articles based on keywords.
  • Scitations: A notification service that alerts authors whenever their articles are cited in recent publications.
  • Scifeed: A notification service that delivers recently published articles corresponding to specified keywords.

Possible Use Cases

  • Identifying journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and preprints across all academic fields.
  • Keeping up to date with the latest research developments.
  • Monitoring the impact and academic trends of publishers, journals, and institutions.
  • Analyzing patterns in specific fields, enabling visualization of research trends.
  • Tracking scientific output and visibility within the global research landscape of an institution.

Support Materials

Link: https://www.connectedpapers.com/

Business Model: Freemium. The free plan allows access to all features but limits users to 5 graphs per month. A Scholarship Program is available, offering substantial discounts or free access to the premium plan.

Brief Description

Connected Papers is a tool that visualizes relationships between scientific articles not through direct citations, but via a measure of similarity based on their bibliographies and co-citations. The resulting visual map positions more closely related articles nearer to each other and separates less-related ones.

This enables rapid exploration of relevant literature and provides insight into how articles are conceptually linked. The knowledge base underpinning the platform is Semantic Scholar.

Possible Use Cases

  • Obtain a visual overview of a research field:
    Starting from a single scientific article, Connected Papers generates a graph displaying the most similar works within the same research area. From these results, additional articles can be explored and new graphs created, progressively building a map of the field. This approach facilitates a visual understanding of major trends, key contributions, and interconnections between works that define the area of study.
  • Quickly identify the most relevant and recent works:
    The visual navigation allows users to intuitively discover recent, important articles on a specific topic without manually managing preliminary lists or bibliographies, enabling efficient orientation within the literature and identification of key contributions.
  • Integrate and complete the bibliography of a thesis or research project:
    Starting from articles already intended for citation, Connected Papers helps identify gaps in the literature review by suggesting additional pertinent and relevant sources.
  • Analyze the evolution of research over time:
    Using the Prior Works and Derivative Works features, users can explore the development of a research lineage.
    • Prior Works identifies foundational articles preceding the target work.
    • Derivative Works identifies subsequent articles, including reviews and recent studies, representing the state of the art that has evolved from the initial work.

Support Materials

Link: https://inciteful.xyz/

Business Model: Free

Brief Description

Inciteful is a platform designed to support the exploration of scientific literature through the analysis of citation networks between articles. Unlike traditional keyword-based search engines, Inciteful uses citation graphs to represent relationships between scientific works, facilitating the identification of relevant, foundational, or conceptually connected articles within a specific research topic.

The platform’s two main tools are Paper Discovery and Literature Connector.

  • Paper Discovery allows users to begin exploration from one or more initial articles (seed papers). The tool constructs a local graph highlighting:
    • Foundational articles, identified based on their influence within the citation network;
    • Thematically related articles, closely connected to the topic of interest.

This tool is particularly useful for exploring a new research field, identifying key contributions, and quickly gaining an overview of the state of the art.

  • Literature Connector enables the analysis of connections between two articles through the citation paths that link them. The tool visualizes intermediate articles and the relationships that connect them, making explicit the links between works that may initially appear distant. This is especially useful for understanding how two ideas, research streams, or even disciplines are interconnected within the scientific literature.

Possible Use Cases

  • Familiarization with a new research field:
    Inciteful supports preliminary exploration of an unfamiliar topic, enabling rapid identification of the most relevant works and main research lines. By visualizing the citation network, the tool facilitates understanding of the field’s structure, key contributions, and relationships between studies.
  • Identification of relevant and up-to-date literature for ongoing work:
    When preparing an article or thesis, Inciteful allows users to expand and update their bibliographic base. In particular, the BibTeX import feature enables the upload of articles already selected in a Reference Management System (RMS) and their use as seed papers. The platform then generates a table of similar articles, facilitating the identification of pertinent and recent contributions.
    If results are insufficiently relevant, this may be due to:
    1. All central articles for the topic already being included in the initial search;
    2. The graph being influenced by marginally related works that are not central to the topic.
      In the latter case, Inciteful allows users to identify and exclude such articles, improving the quality and focus of the analysis.
  • Analysis of recent literature and support for publication decisions:
    Once a coherent set of articles is defined, temporal filters can be applied to display only the most recent works. Additionally, the Top Journals section provides information on the most represented journals within the analyzed corpus, offering guidance for identifying potentially suitable publication venues.
  • Completion of a literature review:
    Literature reviews often rely on complex keyword-based search strategies, which may not capture all relevant studies. Inciteful helps mitigate this risk by allowing the import of articles already identified as seed papers via BibTeX. The tool then generates a thematic graph and a list of similar articles, supporting the identification of missing studies and contributing to a more complete and systematic review.

Support Materials

Link: https://www.researchrabbit.ai/

Business Model: Freemium. The free plan allows unlimited searches, processing results based on a maximum of 50 documents, limited search settings, and the creation of only one project.

Brief Description

Research Rabbit is a tool for exploring scientific literature, primarily based on the knowledge bases of Crossref, Semantic Scholar, and OpenAlex. The platform enables users to search for scientific articles, organize them into personalized collections, and analyze existing connections between works, facilitating the identification of key articles that may have been overlooked during literature review.

Unlike traditional search engines, Research Rabbit does not provide a static list of results. By leveraging citation networks and bibliographic references, the tool visualizes how articles are interconnected based on topic, publication period, and research ideas, offering a dynamic and structured view of the scientific landscape.

The platform includes dedicated functions to import from and export to Zotero.

Possible Use Cases

  • Literature Review: Allows users to identify, organize, and easily visualize related scientific articles within a single dedicated research workspace.
  • Identification of Research Gaps: Facilitates the analysis of citation networks to pinpoint underexplored or particularly promising areas for new scientific investigations.
  • Monitoring Academic Trends: Enables tracking of key authors or relevant keywords, with automatic notifications for the publication of new pertinent articles.
  • Publication Preparation: Supports maintaining an up-to-date bibliography by providing alerts for new studies relevant to one’s research area.
  • Collaborative Research: Allows sharing of article collections with co-authors or research team members, facilitating collaboration and feedback exchange.

Support Materials

Link: https://www.lens.org/

Business Model: Freemium. The free Professional Non-Profit Use plan allows a range of activities, albeit with certain limitations. The platform also offers a comprehensive set of individual and institutional subscription plans.

Brief Description

The Lens is a cross-disciplinary platform that connects scientific research, technological innovation, and intellectual property, supporting strategic decision-making through evidence drawn from academic, industrial, and institutional contexts.

It provides free and integrated access to patents, scholarly publications, and biological sequences, organizing data into comprehensive meta-records that highlight relationships among authors, institutions, research activities, and innovation outputs. The platform enables users to search, analyze, and manage this information through advanced tools, personalized collections, and APIs, offering valuable support for the study of scientific and technological trends and for understanding the processes of knowledge development and application.

Originally developed around 2000 under the name Patent Lens, the platform initially focused on patents, particularly in the agricultural sector. Over time, its scope has expanded to encompass all scientific and technological domains. The Lens is operated by the non-profit organization CAMBIA, whose mission is to treat these resources as a public good by overcoming data fragmentation and supporting researchers, companies, and institutions in evidence-based decision-making.

Possible Use Cases

  • Patent and Intellectual Property Analysis:
    Enables the search, exploration, and evaluation of patents to monitor technological development, analyze competitive landscapes, and support decisions related to the protection and exploitation of intellectual property.
  • Scientific Literature Analysis:
    Provides structured access to academic publications and citation networks, supporting the assessment of scientific impact, the identification of emerging research streams, and comparative analysis across disciplinary fields.
  • Linking Scientific Research and Patents:
    Makes citation relationships between scholarly publications and patent documents explicit, enabling assessment of the contribution of scientific research to technological development and patented innovation.
  • Measurement of Institutional Influence:
    Offers metrics and visualizations to evaluate the scientific and technological influence of academic and industrial institutions, facilitating strategic analysis and comparisons across organizations and sectors.
  • Programmatic Access and Data Reuse:
    Provides APIs and datasets for data extraction, integration, and automated analysis, enabling large-scale studies and the development of customized applications.
  • Management of Author and Inventor Profiles:
    Enables the unambiguous linking of individuals to publications and patents, supporting the monitoring of scientific and technological output and enhancing the visibility of research and inventive activities.

Support Materials

Link (via Eureka): https://unito.on.worldcat.org/oclc/37853368

Business Model: Proprietary, licensed database distributed by Clarivate and accessible through institutional subscription.

Brief Description

Web of Science (WoS) is a bibliographic and citation platform designed to support the discovery and analysis of scientific literature. Its core component, the Core Collection, is a database covering multiple types of academic documents. This is complemented by additional databases, each specialized by discipline, geographic area, or document type. All indexes place strong emphasis on editorial quality and the traceability of citation data.

The platform enables exploration of scientific output through normalized citation relationships, offering advanced tools for analyzing research impact, scientific collaboration, and disciplinary trajectories. Web of Science is tightly integrated with other Clarivate products, including Journal Citation Reports (for the Journal Impact Factor), InCites (for institutional bibliometric analysis), and EndNote (for reference management).

Possible Use Cases

  • Basic Bibliographic Search:
    The database can be used for straightforward bibliographic searches and, thanks to its filters, can be integrated into workflows focused on articles published exclusively in ANVUR A-tier journals.
  • Citation Analysis and Research Evaluation:
    Supports bibliometric studies based on reliable citation networks, useful for evaluating the scientific output of authors, research groups, institutions, and countries.
  • Journal Selection and Evaluation:
    Enables analysis of the positioning and impact of scientific journals.
  • Systematic Reviews and Literature Surveys:
    Supports structured and reproducible searches through advanced filters, citation tracking, and record export functionalities.
  • Analysis of Scientific Collaboration:
    Allows identification of collaborations between authors and institutions, supporting analyses of internationalization and interdisciplinarity in research.
  • Monitoring Research Trends:
    Facilitates the identification of emerging areas, highly cited articles, and evolving research fronts.
  • Support for Research and Funding Activities:
    Commonly used for preliminary analyses in grant applications, benchmarking exercises, and strategic research planning.

Support Materials

Link (via Eureka): https://unito.on.worldcat.org/oclc/60462585

Business Model: Proprietary database owned by Elsevier, accessible through institutional subscription.

Brief Description

Scopus is a multidisciplinary bibliographic and citation database that indexes peer-reviewed scientific literature from journals, conference proceedings, and book series. Its disciplinary coverage is broad and includes science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities.

The platform enables exploration of the scientific literature through advanced search tools, citation analysis, and impact metric visualizations. Scopus integrates structured profiles for authors, institutions, and source titles, and is closely connected to other Elsevier products, such as SciVal (for research performance analysis) and Mendeley (for reference management).

Possible Use Cases

  • Bibliometric Analysis and Performance Evaluation:
    Supports quantitative analyses of scientific output based on citation indicators at the level of authors, institutions, or disciplinary fields.
  • Scientific Literature Search and Mapping:
    Enables complex, multidisciplinary searches with detailed filters by subject area, document type, affiliation, and time period.
  • Author Profile Analysis:
    Provides disambiguated author profiles aggregating publications, citations, affiliations, and impact indicators, useful for monitoring and evaluation purposes.
  • Support for Systematic Reviews:
    Frequently used in combination with other databases for systematic reviews and scoping reviews, due to its extensive coverage.
  • Institutional Benchmarking:
    Enables comparisons between institutions and countries, particularly when integrated with SciVal for strategic research analysis.
  • Identification of Journals and Publication Venues:
    Supports journal selection by providing information on coverage, metrics, and disciplinary scope.

Support Materials

Bibliometric Software

In addition to bibliographic research platforms with bibliometric functionalities, there are also software tools that enable bibliometric analysis of records and, in some cases, the creation of bibliometric maps.

Link: https://www.vosviewer.com/

Business Model: Free

Brief Description

VOSviewer is a tool (available both as locally installable software and web-based) for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks.

These networks can include, for example, scientific journals, researchers, or individual publications, and are created based on citations, bibliographic couplings, co-citations, or co-authorship.

The software also provides text-mining functionalities, which can be used to construct and visualize co-occurrence networks—that is, networks representing the distribution of the most important terms extracted from a set of scientific documents. These networks are built using English-language terms.

Data for creating bibliometric networks can be sourced from a variety of databases, including Web of Science (WOS), Scopus, Dimensions, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Lens, Crossref, and many others.

Support Materials

Link: https://www.bibliometrix.org/home/

Business Model: Free

Brief Description

Bibliometrix is an open-source software developed in the R programming language by the spin-off K-Sinth S.r.l. of the University of Naples Federico II. It is designed to support quantitative bibliometric and scientometric analyses through a wide range of established methods. The software places particular emphasis on mapping scientific knowledge, enabling the identification of temporal trends, research themes, disciplinary dynamics, and the main actors in scientific production.

The tool can be used locally via R or through a web interface accessible to users without programming experience. Bibliometrix allows the import and analysis of bibliographic data from numerous international databases and supports co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, scientific collaborations, and co-word analysis, providing a structured and integrated view of the scientific literature.

Support Materials

Link: https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish

Business Model: Free

Brief Description

Publish or Perish is a software tool designed for retrieving and analyzing academic citations. The program queries various bibliographic databases—including Crossref, Google Scholar, Lens, OpenAlex, Scopus, and Web of Science—to obtain raw citation data, which are then processed to generate a range of bibliometric indicators. These indicators include, in particular, the number of publications, total citations received, and the h-index.

Analysis results can be viewed directly within the software interface and can be exported or copied to other applications, as well as saved in various output formats for further processing and analysis.

The software’s official website provides a series of articles and informational resources dedicated to advanced use of the tool, as well as guidelines on best practices for disseminating and enhancing scientific output.

Publish or Perish serves as a support tool for authors, enabling comparison of their publications with those published in a given journal and assessment of their relative positioning. The software facilitates comparative presentation of results, helping to mitigate citation differences across disciplines and effects related to the age of publications.

The program can also be used to identify the most appropriate journals for submitting work, conduct literature reviews, perform bibliometric analyses, and support other types of academic research.

Possible Use Cases

Support Materials

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