Research metrics

All of the major databases will allow you to export lists of papers and their metadata, though there may be some limits and complications. This page summarises the process for the different tools.

In any Scopus search result, there will be an "export" option. Selecting this will export metadata for everything in your search result, up to 20,000 items.

Select "export", then "CSV" from the pop-up - this is the most useful format. You will then be able to select what fields to include. Note the "truncate for Excel" option - this is important because otherwise papers with very large author lists will overflow the field and cause problems.

For larger downloads (up to the 20,000 item limit) you may be asked to wait while the download is prepared - it will take a few minutes and you will be sent an email when it is ready. If you need more than 20,000 records, we recommend using the "documents --- to ---" option and exporting eg 1 to 20,000, then 20,000 to 25,000.

In any Web of Science search result, there will be an "export" option. Selecting this will export metadata for everything in your search result, up to either 1,000 or 5,000 items.

Selecting "Fast 5K" will get you up to 5,000 results in a standardised format. If you would like more control over the metadata, select "Excel" or "Tab delimited" (a text file in TSV format).  You can then export up to 1,000 results at a time, and use the offset fields to export more - 1 to 1,000, 1,001 to 2,000, and so on.

With the Excel and TSV formats, you can select the metadata to export - a core set of fields, everything in the record, or a manual selection. Unlike Scopus, fields are automatically truncated to avoid Excel overflow problems (so author lists may not be complete if there are thousands of names).

You can also export up to 50,000 items at a time to InCites, and download the full dataset from there in a single go (see below). The metadata here is a little more restricted, but it may be a quicker solution for large datasets.

InCites offers a very standardised set of downloads for papers, giving a consistent and cleaned set of metadata for every item as well as citation metrics. It is however not possible to export some of the richer data from Web of Science such as abstracts or affiliations. Author lists are trimmed to the first 200 names only.

To download a complete custom dataset, go to Organise > Folders, click on the "..." icon, and select "download CSV".

To download a set of records from the main dataset or the MyOrganisation dataset, click on the blue highlighted number in your search results to get a list of papers, and then on "download table" in the pop-up screen. This is valid for up to 50,000 items.

Note that "Download CSV" on the main screen will download the results on the current screen - a table of subjects or organisations, etc.

Altmetric allows you to export potentially very large datasets, including records for papers which are known to Altmetric but do not have any mentions.

On the Research Outputs tab, there will be a button to "Export this tab", with the options being CSV, CSV UTF-8, and the API. We would recommend the second of these - UTF-8 is a little better at handling diacritics and non-English characters which may show up. Exports will contain standard metadata (title, source, etc) plus the Altmetric score and the mention counts as of the date of export.

There is no official cap on the size of the export files; it is only limited by what the Altmetric server can cope with, and potentially several hundred thousand records can be downloaded in a single step.

Altmetric also offers access to APIs for large-scale data access.