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Measuring Your Research Impact

Tools for Tracking Author Impact

ResearcherID

Web of Science features ResearcherID.  With ResearcherID, you can: 

  • Create and manage your scholarly profile
  • Generate citation metrics
  • Connect with other scholars 

See the Author IDs and Name Disambiguation page of this guide for more information.

Journal Citation Reports

Web of Science also features Journal Citation Reports. See the Journal Impact page of this guide for more information.

In Web of Science, you can search by author in order to see citation reports for the works of that author.

Google Scholar Metrics

From Google Scholar:  "Google Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics summarize recent citations to many publications, to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research."

You can look at top journals in particular subject categories and sub-categories.  For each subject field, there is a top 100 list of journals.  The journals are ranked using their 5-year h-index (scroll down on this page for more information on the h-index).  The underlying data come from Google Scholar. Sections on Metrics, Coverage, and Inclusion tell you more about how the rankings were derived.

Modified from https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/researchimpact/journal-impact

Google Scholar Citations

Google Scholar Citations is a citation service provided free of charge.  It is easy to set up, especially if you already have a Google account.  Like other citation tracking services, its author citation metrics account for:

  • Academic articles
  • Theses, book titles and other documents

Use Google Scholar Citations to:

  • View citation graphs of your articles
  • Get an email alert every time an article is cited

Some words of caution on Google Scholar:

Traditionally, an author's impact on their field or discipline has been measured using the number of times that their academic publications are cited by other researchers. However, there are numerous algorithms adapted to account for other important factors. These factors include:

  • Recency of the publication
  • Poorly or highly cited papers 

Some metrics you may encounter are:

The Web of Science uses the H-Index to quantify research output by measuring author productivity and impact.

H-Index = number of papers (h) with a citation number ≥ h.  

Example: a scientist with an H-Index of 37 has 37 papers cited at least 37 times.  

Tools for measuring H-Index:

  • Web of Science
  • Google Scholar

Advantages of the H-Index:

  • Allows for direct comparisons within disciplines

  • Measures quantity and impact by a single value

Disadvantages of the H-Index:

  • Does not give an accurate measure for early-career researchers

  • Calculated by using only articles in journals that are indexed in Web of Science

The G-index was proposed by Leo Egghe in his paper "Theory and Practice of the G-Index" in 2006 as an improvement on the H-Index.  

G-Index is calculated this way: "[Given a set of articles] ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the G-Index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received (together) at least g^2 citations." (from Harzig's Publish or Perish Manual)

Advantages of the G-Index:

  • Accounts for the performance of author's top articles

  • Helps distinguish the difference between authors' respective impacts.  The inflated values of the G-Index help to give credit to lowly-cited or non-cited papers while giving credit for highly-cited papers

Disadvantages of the G-Index:

  • Introduced in 2006 and debate continues whether G-Index is superior to H-Index.  May not be as widely accepted as H-Index

Created by Google Scholar and used in Google's My Citations feature. 

i10-Index = the number of publications with at least 10 citations.  

This very simple measure is only used by Google Scholar, and is another way to help gauge the productivity of a scholar.  

Advantages of the i10-Index:

  • Very simple and straightforward to calculate

  • My Citations in Google Scholar is free and easy to use

Disadvantages of the i10-Index:

  • Used only in Google Scholar

Here is a screenshot of a Google Scholar My Citations page for Charles Darwin (you can see the i10-Index highlighted in the small table):

charles darwin i10