Overview
Researcher impact metrics are calculated from:
- lists of researchers' publications (a list of one researcher's publications)
- lists of published academic works which cite these publications
Perhaps the best-known author impact metric is Hirsch's Index or the h-Index. To have an h-Index of six (6), you have to publish six articles that have been cited at least six times.
Each resource below calculates a researcher's h-index based on the contents of that resource: the h-index for the same scholar may vary among sources of information.
Keep in mind:
- The h-index favours established scholars because it examines scholarly impact over time.
- Citations appearing in books are significantly underrepresented in many sources of information.
- Cross-disciplinary comparisons of individual scholars' h-idexes are not valid because of disciplinary differences in publication and citation patterns.
Hirsch's H-Index
The higher the h-index, the better.
The h-index is the largest number of articles/books, etc. that a researcher has published (N) that have been cited N times.
For example, if a researcher has 5 papers which have been cited 5 or more times, the researcher's h-index is 5.
Web of Science
Connect: Web of Science Core Collection
Source Data: Citations harvested from articles in the journals, book chapters, etc. included in Web of Science Core Collection. WoS is especially strong in science/health science.
Web of Science Citation Reports are available for every individual author that has been cited in Web of Science Core Collection. (Choose Author from the drop down menu.)
Reports for each author include:
- Hirsch's h-index
- Average # number of citations per article, with and without self-citations
- # number of publications, and their citation counts for each of the most recent 20 years
Google Scholar Profile
Connect: Google Scholar Citations. Set up your own scholar profile here.
Source Data: articles from an undisclosed number of journals, conference proceedings, reports, plus an undisclosed subset of the books available in Google Books, etc.
Scholars must set up their own profiles, and may make choose to make their profiles private or public. Public profiles are retrieved by a search by the author's name in Google Scholar, for example, Edward Slingerland (UBC faculty member).
Reports for each author include:
- Hirsch's h-index
- i10 index
- Total # number of citations
Harzing's Publish or Perish
Download Harzing's Publish or Perish free software: here
Source data: Google Scholar, Web of Science Core Collection, Microsoft Academic Search and several others. i.e. journal articles, conference proceedings, reports, book chapters, etc.
Metrics available for each author include