LibGuides: Research Publishing & Impact: Author Metrics

About Author Metrics

Author metrics are used to track how often an author's work is cited, and demonstrate the reach and impact of a researcher's work, for use in grant applications, tenure, promotion and performance reviews. An author's impact is frequently quantified in terms of the number of citations to their publications. Use Author metric terms and key measuring tools for authors and collaborators to measure your impact.

Author metrics are also used to discover key researchers in the field, track the work of colleagues and identify potential collaborators.

One of the biggest challenges to tracking and analysing an author's impact is having a correct, complete publication list for that author. Consider establishing your author profile linking all your publications to a persistent author identifier - see more information in Researcher Profiles & Networks

Author metric terms

The author h-index was proposed by J.E. Hirsch in a 2005 article, which measures a researcher’s impact based on the number of citations to their work.

h-index = number of papers (h) with a citation number ≥ h.

Example: If an author has an h-Index of 9, it means that out of the total number of published documents by that author, 9 of those documents have been cited 9 times.

Keep in mind that the name you publish under may impact on your h-index; search for every variation of your name used in your publications.

Web of Science and Scopus are the main source databases for the author h-index.

Publish or Perish - merge this data with that from Web of Science and Scopus, then deduplicate results

Note: The h-index is not widely used outside the Sciences. At Otago, Humanities scholars are advised not to use the h-index, nor early-career academics. Citation counts do not necessarily reflect research impact in the Humanities. Social Science scholars may find the journal h-index useful when selecting where to publish.

Learn more about the h-index using:

Harzing's Publish and Perish Manual explains the g-index is calculated based on the distribution of citations received by a given researcher's publication.

For example: A g-index of 20 means that an academic has published at least 20 articles that combined have received at least 400 citations.

It was suggested in 2006 by Leo Egghe (See: Theory and practise of the g-index).

One of the main advantages of the g-Index is the inflated values of this index helps give credit to lesser cited or non-cited work whilst attributing credit for highly-cited papers.

The i10-Index, used solely by Google Scholar, was introduced in July 2011. It calculates the number of academic publications an author has written that have at least ten citations from others. This is one way to gauge the productivity of an author.

i10-Index = the number of publications with at least 10 citations.

Learn more:

About Google Scholar metrics

Note: In order to use the i10-Index authors must have a public Google Scholar profile (See: Google Scholar Citations).

Limitations

It is worth remembering that the key measuring tools (databases) only gather data from the journals they index. Some are more comprehensive and cover more disciplines than others, so it is best to use more than one method to track citations and evaluate the author impact. Also note that other material, such as abstracts or conference papers, are generally not included.
Calculating the h-index: Web of Science, Scopus or Google Scholar? This guide from MyRI discusses the pros and cons of using each database to calculate the h-index.
Author naming inconsistencies can lead to missed citations and in some cases multiple entries, so an author must check their entries in the databases carefully. See the Researcher Profiles page for more information on author name ambiguity and attribution.
h-index citation counts do not necessarily reflect research impact in the Humanities, as mentioned above the key measuring tools are not always comprehensive in covering the humanities discipline.
Many of the measuring tools are skewed towards STEM (Science, technology, engineering, medicine) research.
Web of Science counts the number of papers published, therefore favours those authors who publish more frequently and are more advanced in their careers, not early-career researchers.
Like other tools, the citation counts do not measure the number of times a work has been read or accessed (see Altmetrics)

For more information see York University Libraries' Limitations of Bibliometrics

Key measuring tools for authors and collaborators

Scopus Author search

Scopus is a multidisciplinary database from Elsevier, referencing journal articles, books and chapters back to 1823. Citation information goes back to 1996, however, data from 1970 is being added.

Use Author Search to generate a Citation Overview and the Analyze author output page. This analyses the publishing output of an author or a group of matched authors using the h-index.

The h-graph displays the h-index for a single author, multiple authors, or a group of selected documents. The h-index is based on the highest number of papers included that have had at least the same number of citations.

Learn more:

Measure your author impact with Scopus

Web of Science Author search
Web of Science is a multidisciplinary citation database from Clarivate Analytics, formerly Thomson Reuters, covering higher-impact journals in the natural and social sciences, arts and humanities. It is one of the biggest citation indexes, with citation information available back to 1900.

Use Author Search and click Create Citation Report to view the h-index, and other analytics like Author Beamplot.

Researchers can use ResearcherID to manage author names/citations; see Researcher Profiles for more information.

Learn more:

Publish or Perish™
Download this free programme to analyse Google Scholar data:
ᵒ retrieve and analyse citation data to work out your author metrics
ᵒ check the h-index for a journal
ᵒ analyse authors publishing in lead journals in your area of research, especially if your work has limited representation in Web of Science or Scopus.

Learn more:

Note: Publish or Perish version 7 is available as a native macOS application. You no longer need a virtual machine with Windows inside as you did for previous versions of Publish and Perish

Google Scholar Citations
Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. Check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and calculate several citation metrics. Make your profile public, so that it will appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name.

Note: Unless you have a Google Scholar citation profile Google Scholar does not calculate your h-index (but you can use Publish or Perish).

Learn more:

About Google Scholar citation profiles
About Google Scholar Metrics

Essential Science Indicators (ESI)
Essential Science Indicators can determine the influential individuals, institutions, papers, publications, and countries in their field of study — as well as emerging research areas that could impact their work. This unique and comprehensive compilation of science performance statistics and science trends data is based on journal article publication counts and citation data from Web of Science™.
Rank top scientists, institutions, countries, papers and journals in 22 specific fields of research based on journal article publication counts and citation data.
Identify significant trends, determine research output and impact in specific fields of research and find experts and collaboration partners.

Nature Index
The Nature Index is a free database of author affiliation information, that reveals global publication and collaboration patterns, collated from research articles published in an independently selected group of 68 high-quality science journals. The database is compiled by Nature Research. The Nature Index provides a close to real-time proxy for high-quality research output at the institutional, national and regional level. You can search for a specific institution or country from the Nature Index homepage.
Note: The Nature Index website presents a 12-month window of rolling data.

Scholarometer
Scholarometer is a social tool to facilitate citation analysis and help evaluate the impact of an author's publications.
A browser (Firefox and Chrome) extension that uses data from Google Scholar to calculate an author's h-index and the new Hs metric (a normalised h-index). Users can tag authors and papers with subject categories to assist in the analysis of their impact in those fields.

SciVal
SciVal allows you to assess research performance by country, institution, research groups and individuals.
Visualise research performance - by research area, publications, citations, collaboration, and competencies. Benchmark your progress with key metrics - create and compare researchers, research groups and institutions. Locate collaborative partnerships and mentors - analyse existing and potential opportunities. Identify research strengths and shortcomings at institutional level.

Contact your Subject Librarian for assistance with SciVal.

MathSciNet
Index to journals in mathematics and related research. Includes article citation information from the Mathematical Reviews Citation Database.
BIOSIS Citation Index
Citation database of high-impact life sciences journals. Use the Citation Report feature to track citations to articles or calculate your h-index. Content may overlap with Web of Science.
SciFinder Scholar
Aggregates several CAS databases. Search the literature from the chemical disciplines and find citation information to individual publications.
CiteSeerX
Freely-available digital library and repository for Computer and Information Science literature, that links citing web-based documents from publishers, institutional repositories, and self-submissions.

See Citation Metrics: Alternative Metrics as it applies to authors.

Research Publishing & Impact: Author Metrics

About Author Metrics

Author metric terms

Key measuring tools for authors and collaborators

Increase your Author impact

Track your work