Skip to Main Content

Citation Impact

Author Impact

Typically, the impact analysis comes from the number of times others cite your work to demonstrate the validity and quality of one's work but also to analyze the number of published works. One's citations score should not be compared to another in a different discipline. Author impact refers to a number of metric styles. Examples for measuring the author impact include:

  • h-index
  • g-index
  • i10-index.

A number of tools may also be used to access these metrics. It should be noted not to rely on a single source of metrics but to gather various citation rankings.

  • Google Scholar
  • The Lens
  • Publish or Perish
  • Scopus Author ID Free Lookup

Resources for Author Impact

What is it and how does it calculate?

The h-index, or Hirsch Index is used more than other metric styles. This was created by JE Hirsch's An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output in 2005. The h-Index identifies the number of papers h that have received h or more citations. Basically, if an author has an h-index of 8, then they have at least 8 publications with 8 or more citations. It aims to combine quality with quantity. The h-index has the potential to vary depending on the field.

Some free resources available to measure your h-index include:

  1. Select advanced search (this is located in the menu drop down box)
  2. In the "Return articles authored by" field, enter the authors last name in quotes
  3. Then click search (sometimes the search may not always pull up the person you are looking for. Double check the citations to make sure they are pulling in results for the person you intend, you may have to adjust the name depending on how they are cited).
  4. You should be able to select the author within the listings
  5. Citation info will appear in on the right side of the screen

*Important to note that not all searches in Google Scholar bring back scholarly works.

 

  1. You can download the software at  https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish
  2. Next, once it is downloaded, you should be able to click on "new" which will then present three options to you.
  3. Then you can search by author by entering a name and then clicking "lookup."
  4. There will be a results listing. In there you may check the boxes next to your articles. Be careful to look out for duplicate articles, or other authors with similar names.
  1. Enter author last name and first name or initial
  2. Click search
  3. Select correct author from results
  1. Select among patents, scholarly works, profiles, classifications (referring to patent classifications), and climate landscapes (referring to a database of reports on climate change).
  2. For Patents and Scholarly works, enter keywords or scholarly or patent field. For profiles, enter an author or an inventor name. Under profiles, you can select or deselect 'only profiles with associated works' to adjust results.
  3. Click search
  4. Select correct author, publications, or patent information from results.

For more information on how to set up a Lens.org profile, check their website. Additionally, Lens.org can be helpful as it can be populated with data from ORCID, so it is recommended to have an up to date ORCID profile so Lens.org will more accurately reflect a scholar's research metrics.

What is the g-index and how does it calculate?

The g-index was developed by Leo Egghe in his paper Theory and practice of the g-index, 2006. The g-index was designed to be an improvement to the h-index. Although the g-index is not as highly accepted as the h-index is in the academic community however, some do find the results to be effective. The g-index tends to weight highly cited articles more and it calculates the largest number n of highly cited articles for which the average number of citations is at least n. It intends to highlight the performance of an authors highly cited works. The caveat of this is that the g-index favors academics who publish more extensively of course. But the basic understand is that

Some free resources available to measure your g-index

  1. You can download the software at  https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish
  2. Next, once it is downloaded, you should be able to click on "new" which will then present three options to you.
  3. Then you can search by author by entering a name and then clicking "lookup."
  4. There will be a results listing. In there you may check the boxes next to your articles. Be careful to look out for duplicate articles, or other authors with similar names.

Example

https://s3.amazonaws.com/libapps/accounts/6748/images/Screen_Shot_2016-01-22_at_4.04.24_PM.png

Source: University of Pittsburgh Library System.

What is it and how does it calculate?

The i10-index was created by Google Scholar and it is calculated by the number of works with at least 10-citations by other authors. This metric is not overly complex as some of the others may be, but this is only used by Google Scholar.

Google Scholar Citations

  1. Select advanced search (this is located in the menu drop down box)
  2. In the "Return articles authored by" field, enter the authors last name in quotes
  3. Then click search (sometimes the search may not always pull up the person you are looking for. Double check the citations to make sure they are pulling in results for the person you intend, you may have to adjust the name depending on how they are cited).
  4. You should be able to select the author within the listings
  5. Citation info will appear in on the right side of the screen

*Important to note that not all searches in Google Scholar bring back scholarly works.

Example

https://www.lib.uwo.ca/files/researchimpact/Googlescholar2.JPG

Source: Western University Libraries