Abstract
There are many ways in which academic articles can be used outside research contexts for teaching, culture, medical practice, business, policy making, or knowledge communication. Articles that have significant wider benefits may therefore be undervalued if they are assessed through conventional citation indicators and sources ) and Scopus). A range of online document genres and sources may help to evaluate these broader impacts of articles, including academic syllabi, textbooks, clinical trials or guidelines, patents, encyclopedia articles, and grey literature publications. Web citations can be used as a quantitative impact indicator for monitoring the wider impact of articles, especially in the arts, humanities, and social sciences where many research outputs have value beyond academia. This article reviews literature about the web citation analysis of articles and explains different methods to capture web citations from a range of online sources via commercial search engines. The applications and limitations of web citation analysis for wider impact assessment of articles are discussed, in addition to practical advice for data gathering. New web citation indicators can help research evaluation peer review and citation analysis by giving additional information about the wider benefits of published research when a type of impact is required to be assessed by authors, research funders, or evaluators in addition to their academic research impact.