Researcher Metrics & Article Impact
Web of Science Citation Index & H-Index
Web of Science
E. H. Butler Library Subscribes to the Web of Science Citation Index Core Collection. This subscription allows researchers to track their research citations and create a researcher account. Additionally, Web of Science provides researchers with their H-Index, a potential measurement of a researcher's scholarly impact.
Web of Science is also a database that will list citations of specific articles in their index. Look foe researchers that are citing your scholarship and find your H-Index number. For accuracy purposes, it is recommended to claim your researcher account.
Definition of H-Index or Hirsch Index:
the impact of a particular scientist rather than a journal. "It is defined as the highest number of publications of a scientist that received h or more citations each while the other publications have not more than h citations each." For example, a scholar with an h-index of 5 had published 5 papers, each of which has been cited by others at least 5 times.
Graph of H-Index Calculation
Finding Your H-Index in Web of Science
- Visit Butler Library website and select Find
- Select Databases A to Z
- Click on Web of Science
- Select Researchers and search for your name (example: Gordon Pennycook)
- Select the verified (Green Checkmark) account - In order to verify your researcher account, you must first Claim the Account.
- The H-Index number is located with other bibliometric numbers on the right-hand side of the screen
Google Scholar Author Profile & H-Index
Google Scholar has author profiles that can be created and connected to publications indexed in Google Scholar. You will need a Gmail account to create your profile:
How to create a Google Scholar Author Profile:
- Create or login to Gmail account
- Go to Google Scholar
- Click My Profile and Create Profile
- Connect indexed articles to your created account
*Educational or Institutional email address will need to be verified
- Google Scholar ProfilesGoogle Scholar Profiles provide a simple way for authors to showcase their academic publications. You can check who is citing your articles, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name, e.g., richard feynman.
Finding google Scholar Author Profiles & H-Index
To search for a researcher in Google Scholar, simply type in the name of a researcher.
If the name is not appearing, search for an article that is published by the research and click on the authors name.
Google Scholar Researcher Profile:
Below is an example of the H-Index/researcher profile in Google Scholar for the research Gordon Pennycook
About the Google Scholar H-Index
- H-Index is a number which represents a combination of a number of publications and the number of citations of those publications
- H-Index is subject specific and should not be compared across different disciplines
- H-Index increases with time and so early career researchers are disadvantaged
- Not all authors will have a h-index calculated for them by Web of Science and Google Scholar
- Web of Science: publications need to be indexed by Web of Science (Web of Science applies rules to selecting publications to index) for a h-index of an author to be available (if publications are not indexed, a request for indexing may be submitted)
- Google Scholar: a profile must be created by an author before H-Index can be provided by Google Scholar. Google Scholar has a far greater index, meaning it is larger but less selective (includes book chapters and smaller publishers)
- It is possible for an author to only have a h-index in one, Scopus or Google Scholar, and not the other
- Google Scholar H-Index will generally be higher than Scopus h-index
Readings on Researcher Bibliometrics
- Bartoli, A., & Medvet, E. (2014). Bibliometric Evaluation of Researchers in the Internet Age. The Information Society, 30(5), 349–354.Research evaluation, which is an increasingly pressing issue, invariably relies on citation counts. In this contribution we highlight two concerns that the research community needs to pay attention to. One, in the world of search engine facilitated research, factors such as ease of Web discovery, ease of access, and content relevance, rather than quality, influence what gets read and cited. Two, research evaluation based on citation counts works against many types of high-quality works. We also elaborate on the implications of these points by examining a recent nationwide evaluation of researchers performed in Italy. We focus on our discipline (computer science), but we believe that our observations have relevance for a broad audience.
- van den Besselaar, P., & Sandstrom, U. (2019). Measuring researcher independence using bibliometric data: A proposal for a new performance indicator. PloS One, 14(3), e0202712–e0202712.Bibliometric indicators are increasingly used to evaluate individual scientists-as is exemplified by the popularity of the many other publication and citation-based indicators used in evaluation. These indicators, however, cover at best some of the quality dimensions relevant for assessing a researcher: productivity and impact. At the same time, research quality has more dimensions than productivity and impact alone. As current bibliometric indicators are not covering various important quality dimensions, we here contribute to developing better indicators for those quality dimensions not yet addressed.
- Blagus, R., Leskošek, B. L., & Stare, J. (2015). Comparison of bibliometric measures for assessing relative importance of researchers. Scientometrics, 105(3), 1743–1762.Quantitative evaluation of citation data to support funding decisions has become widespread. For this purpose there exist many measures (indices) and while their properties were well studied there is little comprehensive experimental comparison of the ranking lists obtained when using different methods. A further problem of the existing studies is that lack of available data about net citations prevents researchers from studying the effect of measuring scientific impact by using net citations (all citations minus self-citations). In this paper we use simulated data to study factors that could potentially influence the degree of agreement between the rankings obtained when using different indices with the emphasis given to the comparison of the number of net citations per author to other more established indices.
