Your Manuscript Assessment tool to get your manuscript ready for submission. A guide on using bibliographic metrics and altmetrics to evaluate the impact of your author impact.
Researcher Impact
Measuring an author’s impact on their discipline or field is traditionally accomplished using the number of times an author has published and the number of times the publication is cited. While a simple method of measuring the impact is to manually create a list of the publications and the correlating citations, there are numerous tools based on published data. For further information on the common metrics and details of the tools, you can use to measure your research impact, see the following.
Common Metrics of Researcher Impact
h-index
- Attempts to measure: quality and quantity of author’s work
- h-index is the number of papers (h) that have received (h) or more citations.
An author with an h-index of 8 has 8 papers cited at least 8 times. - Strengths:
- Includes more than a single data point (e.g. quality and quantity)
- Easy to calculate and understand
- Limitations:
- Early career researchers are inaccurately measured
- Only measures published works
- Results are limited to the indexes of the tool, such as Web of Science or Scopus
g-index
- Quality and quantity of author’s work
- The g-index is calculated by ranking an author’s articles in decreasing order of the number of citations each received. The unique largest number such that the top g articles received, together, at least g^2 citations is the g-index.
- Strengths:
- Evaluates overall record
- Allows highly-cited papers to boost low-cited papers
- Limitations:
- Only measures published works
- Complex calculation
- Not as widely known or accepted as the h-index
i10-index
- Quality of an author’s work
- Measures the number of publications with at least 10 citations
- Strengths:
- Easily calculable
- Google Scholar’s My Citation feature is free and easy to use
- Limitations:
- Used only in Google Scholar
- Limited to works indexed by Google Scholar
- Only measures published works
Common Tools for Citation Data
A multidisciplinary database, with searchable author abstracts, covering the journal literature of the sciences, social sciences, and arts. Provides personal accounts for citation reports by author and citation maps for articles.
Track citations to your publications and determine the citation source to your publications. Graph your citations over time.
Note: A Google account using an academic email account is required. Authors of scholarly articles should claim their Google Scholar page to verify that your publications listings are accurate and complete. You can also create an author profile by following the instructions on the Google Scholar Citation page
A free author and journal impact metrics software program developed by Anne Wil Harzing to retrieve and analyze citations to articles. The software uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations. The tool can be used to locate most cited articles by searching in the general citations field.
Registration for an ORCID number is required. An ORCID is a unique id number that distinguishes you from every other researcher.
The id can be integrated into the research workflow such as manuscript and grant submissions and it supports automated linking between for your professional activities.
