Research Impact

Citation counts and h-indexes (or similar) are commonly used for measuring author impact.  They can be used to:

• identify authors you might want to cite or collaborate with
• in PBRF portfolios

h-Index

• Measures the accumulative impact of an author's scholarly output
• Also known as the Hirsch index or Hirsch number (developed by J.E. Hirsch in 2005).
• The value of h is equal to the number of papers (N) in the list that have N or more citations. 
  h-14 indicates the author has published 14 articles that have each been cited at least 14 times.
• Each database may produce a different h-index for the same scholar due to the number of journals indexed by the database.

i10-Index

• A metric used in Google Scholar profiles for measuring the impact of an author's publications. 
• The i10-index is the number of scholarly publications that have been cited at least 10 times. 
  i10-index 14 indicates the author has published 14 articles that have each been cited at least 10 times.

Citation tracking

Many article databases provide citation numbers and/or lists of citing documents, for example, Scopus, Google Scholar, OVID databases, JSTOR, EBSCO, PubMed, and IEEE.

There are some key tools you can use to find the influential authors in your research field, and who has cited your published work and where. We recommend you use all three. Although they may return identical results, there is a good chance that at least one tool will find something the others do not.

• Scopus
• Dimensions 
• Google Scholar

Other library databases, such as EBSCO, Emerald, ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, JSTOR, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and Ovid, also provide citation information. These database can be used as additional tools for finding citations of your articles.

Author identifier and profile

Scopus assigns each author a unique number and groups all publications written by that author (and indexed in Scopus) to create a author profile. Author profiles allow you to analyse the citations and other data relating to an author's publications.

To find an author profile:

• On the Scopus search page, click Authors > type in an author's name and the affiliation of the author > click Search.
• An author may have more than one author record due to name variations in different publications. Authors can ask Scopus to update their author records by using the Request to merge authors option if it is active on the search result page. 

• Click on the author name. The profile page includes: documents in Scopus, citations, h-index, author ID, topics, and co-authors.

• Click on View h-graph to see how the h-index is generated.
• Click on Analyse author output for more data
• Click View citation overview  to see citation details. You may exclude self citations from the citation overview page:

• You can also find details of all citing articles
• Creating a link between the author ID and ORCiD will update your ORCiD record automatically

Watch the Scopus Search for an author and view their profile tutorial.

Collaboration

• Click on Co-Authors and then View in search results format for data on the author's collaborators

Dimensions enables analysis of author impact under the Researchers filter. Metrics include publication citations, Field citation ratio (FCR), Relative citation ratio (RCR), and Altmetric scores.

• Open the Researcher filter on the left panel to search for an author, then click Limit to
• The main panel will display an author's profile overview and publications 
• Open Analytical Views on the right panel for options to analysing the impact of this author's publications, or 

• Options for analysis include Research categories, Open Access, Researchers (co-authors), and Sources (for example, journals)
• For each category there are options to view data, for example Aggregated, Bar chart, Timeline, Heat map.
• There are also options to change parameters, for example in Research category you can choose to change the metrics indicator

• In the Overview section, you can select indicators to analyse Academic impact or Altmetric attention 

Collaboration

• Click on the Researchers section and select the Network view
• You can select co-authorship analysis or change to citation analysis
• You can also select how many researchers you'd like shown in the visualisation

You can use Google Scholar My Profile to create your profile and use it for tracking citation counts. The h-index and i10-index in your profile are automatically updated by Google Scholar. Making your research profile public will help other researchers find your publications.

See our Researcher ID and Profile guide for more details on creating a Google Scholar profile.

 Google Scholar does not have the analytical capacity of Web of Science or Scopus. But a software programme Publish or Perish developed by Anne Harzing uses Google Scholar to retrieve and analyse citations. This free sofeware can be downloaded from its website.

Use Author Search to find an author's publications and h-index.

Watch the video: Publish or Perish software: Author searches