Research Metrics: Measuring the Influence and Impact of Research

Author level research metrics are designed to quantitatively describe an individual's impact and relevance over the course of their publishing career through the use of citations to their published work.

What is the h-Index?

"Index h, [is] defined as the number of papers with citation number higher or equal to h" Hirsch, 2005

Where can I find my h-Index?

• Web of Science
• Create a profile in Google Scholar
• Scopus
• Use the Publish or Perish software

Harzing's Publish or Perish software uses Google Scholar to obtain citations from a particular author and calculate these statistics:

• Total number of papers
• Total number of citations
• Averages
• H-Index
• Various off-shoots of the H-Index such as the G-Index

The h-index and m quotient:

Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output . PNAS 102 (46) 16569-16572; 5, doi:10.1073/pnas.0507655102.

A review article of the more recent assessment options:

Zhang, Chun Ting. (2012) The h’-Index, Effectively Improving the h-Index Based on the Citation Distribution. PLoS ONE 8(4): e59912. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0059912

Thompson, Dennis F.; Callen, Erin C.; Nahata, Milap C. (2008) New indices in scholarship assessment. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 73 (6), Article 111.

The g-index:

Egghe, Leo (2006). Theory and practise of the g-index. Scientometrics 69 (1), 131-152. DOI:10.1007/s11192-006-0144-7.

The A-index

Burrell, Quentin L. (2007). On the h-index, the size of the Hirsch core and Jin's A-index. Journal of Informetrics 1 (2), 170-177. DOI:10.1016/j.joi.2007.01.003.

The Creativity Index

Soler, Jose M. (2007). A rational indicator of scientific creativity. Journal of Informetrics 1 (2), 123-130. DOI:10.1016/j.joi.2006.10.004.

i10-index:  the number of publications with at least 10 citations each. Introduced in 2011 by Google Scholar.

Follow these steps to generate a report of who is citing your work in the Web of Science

1. Find your author profile by doing a search under RESEARCHERS in Web of Science.
2. Look to the right on your profile page for the Metrics box. Click on the number above Citing Articles.
3. Now you are on a results screen listing the citing articles. Click on “Analyze Results” – a button on the right, above the articles.
4. The default analysis is Web of Science Categories, but just pull down that menu and change it to Authors.
5. Now you will see the top authors citing your articles. You can download this as a visual or a table.

Follow these steps to generate a report of who is citing your work in the Scopus database

1. Find your author profile by doing a search under Authors in Scopus
2. On your profile page, click the tab that says “Cited by ___ Documents” and then click “View list in search results format”
3. Now you are on a results screen listing the citing articles. Click on box next to All and then click “Analyze search results”
4. On the Analyze search results page, you will see a box for Documents by author. Click on the box to view and download the data.