Bibliometrics and Citation Analysis : Author Metrics
- About This Guide
- Journal Metrics
- Author Metrics
- Article Metrics
- Alternative Metrics
- Further Support and Reading
H-Index and Its Variations
- An index to quantify an individual's scientific research outputProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2005, Vol.102(46), pp.16569-72.
- h-Index: A review focused in its variants, computation and standardization for different scientific fieldsJournal of Informetrics 3 (2009) 273–289.The h-index and some related bibliometric indices have received a lot of attention from the scientific community in the last few years due to some of their good properties (easiness of computation, balance between quantity of publications and their impact and so on). Many different indicators have been developed in order to extend and overcome the drawbacks of the original Hirsch proposal. In this contribution we present a comprehensive review on the h-index and related indicators field. From the initial h-index proposal we study their main advantages, drawbacks and the main applications that we can find in the literature. A description of many of the h-related indices that have been developed along with their main characteristics and some of the works that analyze and compare them are presented. We also review the most up to date standardization studies that allow a fair comparison by means of the h-index among scientists from different research areas and finally, some works that analyze the computation of the h-index and related indices by using different citation databases (ISI Citation Indexes, Google Scholar and Scopus) are introduced.
H-Index?
Definintion of h-index:
"A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np − h) papers have no more than h citations each."
In other words, a scholar with an index of h has published h papers each of which has been cited in other papers at least h times. Thus, the h-index reflects both the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. The index is designed to improve upon simpler measures such as the total number of citations or publications. The index works properly only for comparing scientists working in the same field; citation conventions differ widely among different fields.
Where Can I Find an Author's H-Index?
- Web of ScienceAfter searching for a specific author and filtering the results list to include only scholarly articles, click the Create Citation Report link on the top right of the results panel.
- ScopusUse the Scopus Authors Search to find a specific author's profile in Scopus - the profile will have their citations and h-index
- Google ScholarUse the Advanced Search options in Google Scholar by clicking the down arrow in the search box. Then search by author name. Google Scholar displays h-index data for articles as well as authors, but the author must have created a Google Scholar account. Authors with accounts will have underlined names in the results list.
- Publish or PerishPublish or Perish is a free software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents many statistics.
Author Disambiguation
Authors can now create unique identifiers that can be used to link their publications and presentations across databases. These IDs are especially useful for authors with more common names or authors that have changed their name over time.
- ORCIDThis should be your primary ID. Any platform specific author IDs can be linked to the ORCID.ORCID is a nonprofit helping create a world in which all who participate in research, scholarship and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions and affiliations, across disciplines, borders, and time.
- ResearcherIDIntergrated with the Web of Science database. Create an account here and link your ORCID. This will allow your papers to be found in Web of Science by searching for your ORCID.