No single metric will provide an accurate and comprehensive picture of your impact. While metrics like the widely used h-index attempt to quantify publication impact with a single metric, consider assessing your publication output and citation impact separately to more accurately demonstrate your impact, especially if you're an early career researcher.
Basic author metrics for publications include:
The two main sources to find or calculate these metrics are Web of Science and Google Scholar. However, because these platforms have different criteria for what citations are included, the total number of citations for the same publication or same author is likely to be different on each platform.
The h-index is a measure of the cumulative citation performance of a researcher’s publications, using both the total number of publications and the number of citations. While it is one of the most widely used author metrics, it has many limitations that affect its usefulness and accuracy as a measure of researcher impact.
h-index = number of publications (h) with a citation number ≥ h
Not an accurate measure for comparing researchers of different ages. Early-career researchers will always have fewer publications than senior researchers, as well as a lower number of citations since it takes time for citations to accrue.
Not appropriate for comparing citation performance across disciplines since citation practices and patterns will vary by discipline.
Does not take into account the nature of author contributions to each of their papers. In disciplines where co-authorship is more common, particularly large multi-author groups, the h-index may reflect an author's participation in large teams rather than their individual contributions.
Does not provide context for citations. For example, citations may be critical, rather than supportive, of the original work.
Can vary based on which citations are included in the calculation data. For example, it is common for a researcher to have two different h-indexes in Web of Science and Google Scholar.
In addition to calculating an author's h-index, Google Scholar also includes the i10-index, which represents the number of publications with at least 10 citations. While this metric is easy and free to calculate, it is only used in Google Scholar and has all of the same limitations as the h-index.
This proprietary analysis visualizes an author's publications and their citation performance over time.
The Web of Science geographic citation map shows your citations across the globe. It demonstrates the international reach of your publications and highlights areas where your impact is more pronounced.
Your map can be accessed from your Researcher Profile Metrics Dashboard. Click on red pins to see the details of citing papers from a given location. Citing paper details for a given city are grouped by institution. Click on blue circles to zoom in and view more red pins.
Citing paper locations are based on the institutions its authors were affiliated with at the time of its publication. A given citing paper may be represented several times on a map if researchers from multiple institutions contributed to it. This means that the number of points indicated on the map may be higher than your total citation count.
Chat
