Research Metrics: Author Metrics

Citation Reports in Web of Science

You can find an author's citation metrics (e.g., h-index) in various literature databases like Web of Science and Scopus. Search for the author by name then view their "Citation Report" (Web of Science) or "Citation Overview" (Scopus). Remember that these metrics will vary depending on what the database indexes.

Web of Science Core Collection
Collection of citation databases, providing abstracts and indexing and cited reference searching to over 10,000 high impact scholarly research journals worldwide, including Open Access journals and over 110,000 conference proceedings, and covering topics in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
Access is restricted to current students, faculty, and staff of the University of Saskatchewan, and walk-in users, for educational, research, and non-commercial personal use. Systematic copying or downloading of electronic resource content is not permitted by Canadian and international copyright law.
Scopus
A very large abstract and index database of research literature and quality web sources covering the science, technology, and medicine (STM), and social sciences.
Access is restricted to current students, faculty, and staff of the University of Saskatchewan, and walk-in users, for educational, research, and non-commercial personal use. Systematic copying or downloading of electronic resource content is not permitted by Canadian and international copyright law.

Harzing's Publish or Perish Software

Publish or Perish (PoP)

PoP is a free software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:

Total number of papers
Total number of citations
Average number of citations per paper
Average number of citations per author
Average number of papers per author
Average number of citations per year
Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
Egghe's g-index
The contemporary h-index
The age-weighted citation rate
Two variations of individual h-indices
An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

This blog post gives a simple "how-to" guide to getting started with the software.

There is also an accompanying book (print available in the library):

The publish or perish book : your guide to effective and responsible citation analysis / Anne-Wil Harzing

Handbook: Maximising the Impact of your Research

This handbook provides evidence-based advice and guidance on how to ensure that your work achieves its maximum visibility and influence with both academic and external audiences. Directed at social scientists, but broadly useful for all academics.

Produced by the London School of Economics (LSE) Impact of Social Sciences project.

Some Definitions

Hirsch's h-index

Proposed by J.E. Hirsch (2005) in his paper An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output, arXiv:physics/0508025. It aims to provide a robust single-number metric of an academic's impact, combining quality with quantity.

Egghe's g-index

Proposed by Leo Egghe in his paper Theory and practice of the g-index, Scientometrics, Vol. 69, No 1 (2006), pp. 131-152. It aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to highly-cited articles.

Zhang's e-index

The e-index was proposed by Chun-Ting Zhang in his paper The e-index, complementing the h-index for excess citations, PLoS ONE, Vol 5, Issue 5 (May 2009), e5429. The e-index is the (square root) of the surplus of citations in the h-set beyond h², i.e., beyond the theoretical minimum required to obtain a h-index of 'h'. The aim of the e-index is to differentiate between scientists with similar h-indices but different citation patterns.

**See more metric definitions on Dr. Harzing's website.