Research Impact and Author Profiles

Web of Science

To find all of your published articles and who has cited them, begin with an Author Search.  Use the drop down arrow to change "Topic" to "Author" and search by your last name followed by initials, (e.g., Wilson SE).   Review the result list and check the articles you have authored. Then add the checked articles to the "Marked Items" list. If you have published under different name formats, search for those names and add them to the "Marked List." Then click on the "Marked List" to view it, scroll down to the articles list, and then select "Create Citation Report."  The Citation Report includes the h-index.  The video below describes how to interpret and use data iin the citation report.

Google Scholar Citations

Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and view citation metrics You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name.

You must have a Google account and g-mail address to use Google Scholar Citations.  From the Google Scholar opening page, go to My Citations and follow the prompts to create your profile.  For specific directions, FAQs, and how to automatically update your account, see Setting up your profile.

The h-index (Hirsch index) is an indicator that measures the productivity (# of publications) and impact (# of citations) of a particular researcher.  An h-index of 30 means that an author has 30 papers and each paper has been cited at least 30 times.  Both the Web of Science Citation Report and Google Scholar Citations metrics include the author’s h-index.  However, the h-index may not be the same in both reports as they do not index the same body of literature.

 Advantages of the h-index:

• Allows for direct comparisons within disciplines
• Measures quantity and impact by a single value

 Disadvantages of the h-index:

• Is not an accurate measure for early-career research
• Varies in different resources since databases index different journals, have different years of coverage, and include citations from different types of publications or social media

To manually calculate your h-index, organize articles in descending order, based on the number of times they have been cited.

In the below example, an author has 8 papers that have been cited 33, 30, 20, 15, 7, 6, 5 and 4 times. This tells us that the author's h-index is 6.

Calculation Rationale

• The first paper has been cited 33 times, and gives us a 1 (there is one paper that has been cited at least once)
• The second paper has been cited 30 times, and gives us a 2 (there are two papers that have been cited at least twice)
• The third paper gives us a 3, and we can follow this same formula all the way to sixth paper
• The final two papers have no effect in this case as they have been cited less than six times
• We find that there are 6 papers that have each been cited at least 6 times = h-index of 6

 Publish or Perish is a free software program that retrieves and analyses academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw data so there are some caveats. All data needs to be verified for accuracy, check for duplicate citations and determine that all the citations are from scholarly works.  The Publish or Perish website provides the software download and further information about using this product