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Managing your Research profile: Measuring Researcher Impact

Managing your Research profile

the h-Index

The h-index is based on the number and impact of a researcher’s publications.  An h-index of 20 means that, out of all papers published by an author, 20 of them have been cited at least 20 times. 

Three resources— Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar—include the necessary citation data for h-index in their respective databases. The h-index of an author will be different in each of these databases, since they only calculate using their own journal content.

The h-index was proposed in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch to quantify the research achievement of physicists based on their publication record. In the diagram below a researcher with an index of h, out of all his publications, h publications have at least h citations each.

H-index from a plot of decreasing citations for numbered papers

Your friendly librarian

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Rani Anand
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02-312-3935

Using Web of Science to find your citations and H-index

Citation Analysis for a Known Author 

         You hav two options for searing an Author.
         
1. Use Basic Search function and select Author dropdown
2. Use Auther search option 

Using the Search function, type the name of a known author. For an author that published under different initials, make sure you include all the initials to retrieve all the published papers in the Web of Science. You can also select from Index of authors .

 

On the results page, on the right hand side above the results, click on Create Citation Report to see the citation analysis for the author.

The Create Citation Report option gives the numbers for published items in each year, citations in each year, total citations, average citations per item, and the h-index.

Citation Analysis for a Known article or book

Using the Cited Reference Search function, enter as much information as you have. Click Search.

Using Scopus to find your citations and H-index

1. Click on Author Search.

2. Type your last name and your initial and click Search.

3. Select the names that match your name.

4. Click on Show Documents to see your publications and how they were cited in Scopus.

5. Click on Select All and then View Citation Overview.

6. You will see your H-Index.

Scopus only calculates citations received since 1996

Using Google Scholar

Publish or Perish

Publish or Perish is a free software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations using data from Google Scholar or Microsoft academic search.

POP calculates:

  • total number of papers
  • total number of citations
  • average number of citations per paper/book
  • average number of citations per author
  • the h-index
  • other metrics

Download Publish or Perish

SCIVAL/SCOPUS citation Metrices