Author level metrics are quantitative measures that highlight the impact of an individual author typically through citation. Author metrics can be used to discover key researchers in the field, track the work of colleagues, and identify potential collaborators. Below are terms commonly used when referring to author level metrics and also several popular author profile systems and what methods they use to calculate an author's impact.
Introduced in 2006, the g-index is a variation of the h-index. Unlike the h-index, the g-index is strongly affected by highly-cited items. It 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" (Harzig's Publish or Perish Manual).
Limitations:
Created by Google Scholar, the i10-index is quite straightforward. It is simply the number of publications with 10 or more citations
Limitations
It is only used in Google Scholar.
The Metrics Toolkit is a website that can provide more guidance for demonstrating and evaluating claims of research impact. They give four specific recommendations:
For more information read this review of the Metrics Toolkit.
Remember, let metrics be just one tool out of many to measure your research impact!
1. To find a researcher's h-index with Google Scholar, search for their name.
2. If a user profile comes up with the correct name, discipline, and institution, click on that.
3. The h-index will be displayed for that author under "citation indices."
1. Go to Scopus' author lookup tool. (We do not have a subscription to the Scopus database, but this feature is free.)
2. Search for author by name and institution.
3. From the results page, click on the name that matches the author of interest. If there is more than one entry for the author, you can select multiple entries. The h-index appears on this page but more information is available if you click "View citation overview."
4. The citation overview can be exported or printed. Below the graph, it shows each published article with citations by year for the most recent 5 years.
Be aware that not all h-indices are accurate!
h-indices can vary by source since databases include different journals in terms of subject coverage as well as volume of journals included. In addition, name variations can lead to inaccurate h-indices. We recommend confirming articles, utilizing database-specific author IDs, and attaching ORCiDs where possible. We also recommend checking h-index in both Web of Science and Scopus to identify potential issues with accuracy.
Publish or Perish is a free, downloadable software program that uses Google Scholar data to help scholars track citations to their publications to demonstrate their impact for the purposes of tenure and promotion. In addition to basic descriptive statistics (such as number of publications, number of citations, number of citations per paper, number of citations per year, and so forth), it also calculates citation metrics, including the h-index and several variations on it, such as the g-index.
Check out the Scholarly Profiles Tools libguide here!
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