Scholarly Impact: Author Citation Metrics

Author Citation Metrics

The H-index is an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar.  The index was created by Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at University of California, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.  It is calculated by using the number of publications and their citations.  You have an H-Index of X if you have published X papers with at least X citations each. In other words, someone with an H-Index of 5 has published 5 papers with at least 5 citations each. 

H-Index is meant to be used as a comparison tool within a discipline and among scholars of similar experience.  Your H-Index is also entirely relative to the tool you are using to calculate citations.  Therefore, the H-Index of a biomedical scientist should not be compared to the H-Index of a social scientist.  Your GoogleScholar H-Index may vary from the H-Index calculated by Thomson’s Web of Science or ResearchGate. 

Here are some common sources for finding your H-Index:

1. Google Scholar --  If the author has registered with Google Scholar, their name is hyperlinked in article results to their profile.  This will list their total number of citations, their h-index, and their i10-index.  Google Scholar is presumed to be the largest of the citation indexes, but it includes citations of non-scholarly work & student publications like theses and dissertations.  

2. Research Gate -- This is a free, social networking site for scientists allowing them to share their work with peers and find collaborators.  Many members post their papers to this site, and this allows Research Gate to trace citations within its system and calculate an H-Index.  These scores can go up or down depending on the papers in the system, and there is a strong correlation to citation counts on Google Scholar.  H-Index for individual scholars are found on their "Scores" tab.

Hartzings Publish or Perish -  This is a free software download that allows you to more accurately refine your Google Scholar citations.  This can help you deduplicate authors or calculate citations only ISI cited.  Can calculate H-index, G-Index, several variations of the individual H=indices, and an analysis of the number of authors per paper.  It also givers you an age-weighted citation rate.