Early this year, Digital Science, the home of Altmetric, Figshare, and ReadCube, launched a new service, Dimensions. Claiming more than 90 million publications, grants, patents, and other materials, Dimensions is poised to offer an intriguing “comparatively open” alternative to the main line citation databases, Web Of Science, which the Libraries provide to campus, and Scopus, which the campus does not subscribe to.
Dimensions provides a free search interface with filters for facets such as publication year, field of research, publication type, or researcher / author. An Open Access filter allows you to quickly identify freely available papers. Metrics include the Altmetric Attention Score ( a weighted count of mentions, links, social media attention, and more), Relative Citation Ratio (RCR, a comparison of the citation performance of an article against others in its field) , and Field Citation Ratio (FCR, a comparison of the citation performance of an article that takes into account its relative age).
Dimensions search results for Peter S. Ungar.
Users of the free Dimensions search app can create a personal login to save citations and export formats, link to your ReadCube account, or link your ORCID profile. Dimensions is also available to institutions as a subscription product for analyzing research output and identifying grant and collaboration opportunities.
Read more about Dimensions from researcher Mike Thelwall (University of Wolverhampton): “Dimensions: A competitor to Scopus and the Web of Science?” Journal of Informetrics, 12(2), 430–435. 10.1016/j.joi.2018.03.006 [paper available at arxiv.org.], or on the blog Scholarly Kitchen. Or participate in a “Dimensions in 30 Minutes” webinar to learn more.