Research Metrics. H-Index is used to measure authors, groups of authors, and organizations.

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1 Research Metrics WHAT IS RESEARCH IMPACT? Research Councils UK (RCUK) defines research impact as 'the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy'. Research Impact Metrics are an attempt to measure the importance of an article, a journal, or the research output of an author, group of authors, or an institution. Impact Factor is used to measure journals. H-Index is used to measure authors, groups of authors, and organizations. Citations are used to measure articles. You cannot find out the Impact Factor of an author because Impact Factor is a form of measurement that applies only to journals. WHAT IS IMPACT FACTOR? Impact Factor is an evaluation of a journal s research impact and importance within a single year. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in a specific year by the total number of articles published in the two preceding years. For example, the 2013 Impact Factor measurement of a journal is calculated by dividing all citations received in 2013 with the number of articles published in 2012 and For example, this is a breakdown of the Impact Factor of the journal Bioscience: WHAT IS H-INDEX? The H-index measures the productivity and impact of a scientist, group of scientists, or a university. The calculation is based on the number of published papers and number of citations that they have received. For example, an H-index of 3 means that at least 3 of the author s papers have been cited at least 3 times each. WHY ARE THEY IMPORTANT? The reliability and accuracy of these measurements are by no means perfect but they have enough merit and value that faculty and researchers worldwide use them to: Determine the importance of an individual or organization's research. o Which becomes a factor in hiring, funding, and promotional decisions and applications. Determine which journals to publish in; Identify the leading research, researchers, and organizations in your field, as well as potential collaborators. 1

2 In Kazakhstan, the rules for awarding academic titles to faculty are as follows: HOW CAN I TELL WHAT A GOOD H-INDEX OR IMPACT FACTOR IS? There is no one right answer for this question. Impact Factor and H-Indexes vary widely across disciplines. For example, scientists tend to cite more than humanities researchers, mathematicians tend to cite less than biologists. You can determine how an Impact Factor ranks by looking up journals within a specific discipline via Web of Science and ranking them according to Impact Factor. Instructions for this are on page 4. For H-Index, it may help to read the original publication by J.E. Hirsch, who developed the H-Index: WEB OF SCIENCE V. SCOPUS V. GOOGLE SCHOLAR Eugene Garfield devised the Impact Factor measurement in 1960 for ISI, which is now Web of Science. WoS is the global standard of citation indexing and so it is the most commonly referred to resource within this guide. Each of these databases on its own may not provide a comprehensive picture of Impact Factor/H-Index. As with any research, it s a good idea to look in more than one source. Number of Journals Coverage of subject areas Web of Science Scopus Google Scholar Least number of journals covered Sciences and social sciences More journals than WoS Sciences. More international journals than WoS Widest coverage of journals Widest coverage of subjects Coverage of time Contains fewer older publications than WoS Author pages No individual author pages. Must look up by initials and weed out incorrect results. Individual author pages. Individual author pages if author has created a Google Scholar Citation account. Content Academic content Academic content Includes some nonacademic content 2

3 TO FIND THE IMPACT FACTOR OF A SPECIFIC JOURNAL Go to the library home page ( and log in on the top right. Then select Resources Databases Current Subscriptions. Find Web of Science in the alphabetical list and open it. Once in Web of Science, click on Journal Citation Reports on the top left. Select Search for a Specific Journal and Submit. Enter the name of the journal and select Search. A record will appear showing the Impact Factor, along with other information. Click on the title of the journal for more detailed information. Clicking on the Welcome button will bring you back Home and clicking on the? Help button will provide you with definitions of the various measurements. 3

4 TO FIND TOP JOURNALS IN A SPECIFIC DISCIPLINE (aka WHERE SHOULD I PUBLISH?) In JCR, get back to the home page (by clicking on Welcome) and select View a group of journals by Subject Category. Then click on Submit. Highlight the subject and select the drop down next to View Journal Data and sort by Impact Factor. Click on Submit. You will then see a list of journals ranked by highest to lowest Impact Factor within that specific discipline. To resort, select the dropdown menu next to Sorted by. 4

5 TO FIND THE MOST CITED ARTICLES PUBLISHED ON A SPECIFIC TOPIC Do a keyword search from the main Web of Science page. Resort your results by Times Cited highest to lowest. INCREASE YOUR IMPACT It's best practice to create and link as many of these accounts as possible. It's easiest to manage your publication list through ORCID and then link your ResearcherID and Scopus accounts (at this time, Google Scholar cannot be linked with other accounts). ORCID Register through ORCID ( If you find some articles are missing, there are two main ways you can add publications: Link to works from another system ie. Web of Science. However, this does not work for Google Scholar ( Manually add works ( Scopus Scopus automatically assigns author IDs, which means that its author profiles tend to be the most inaccurate. In 2016, Scopus aims to seamlessly merge with ORCID. But for now, Scopus seems mostly unable to link to articles that are not within the database. ResearcherID ResearcherID ( is a free service through Thomson Reuters (the same publisher of Web of Science). Simply go to the website and create an account and then link your ORCID ID ( Google Scholar Go to Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) and click on My Citations. Begin organizing your account! TO FIND AN AUTHOR S H-INDEX Searching for the H-Index of an author can be tricky. It is not possible for one resource to comprehensively distinguish and compile every article an author has written on its own. The solution is for authors to compile their own list of articles. 5

6 There are four primary sites through which authors can do this and it is a good idea for authors to register with all four: ORCID Google Scholar ResearcherID Scopus To find an author's H-Index you can: 1) Search ORCID directly (though it is currently not as active as Google Scholar or WoS). 2) Search Google Scholar for the author's name or the title of an article they've written. If their name appears underlined, it means it is hyperlinked to an author profile with their H-Index. 3) Search ResearcherID for an author's name. Select the author's name from the results list. 6

7 The results list defaults to showing a list of publications. Click on Citation Metrics on the left to see the author's H-Index. 4) Search Scopus for an author's name. Authors are automatically assigned an ID. Authors can edit and verify their information. However, there is no way to tell whether an author has done so. Select the author from the list to see their H-Index. If an Author Has Not Created a Profile If an author has not created their own profile, you can do an author search on Scopus (see above) or Web of Science (see below). 7

8 Go to the main Web of Science page and enter in the author s name, in quotations, using the format (last name) (first initials). From the search results page, select Create Citation Report on the top right. This author has an H-Index of 26, which means that he has 26 articles that have been cited at least 26 times. For the H-Index calculation, we are only concerned with the top 26 articles, even though there is a total number of 103. So we must go through the first 26 articles to ensure they were all written by the correct author because there may be authors with the same initials, or Web of Science may have searched spelling variants. For example the below result shows an article with Dickson, R.E. as author. 8

9 Select the checkbox and click on Go at the top to remove the article from the list. Now the H-Index is 25. An orange line indicates the cutoff of articles in the list that do not contribute to the H-Index calculation. The H-Index number will never go down and can only go up. TO SET UP AN ALERT TO KNOW WHEN YOUR ARTICLES ARE CITED Make sure you re logged into your WoS account. Search for the article, click on the title, and click on Create Citation Alert. You ll then be prompted to save, and then you ll be notified any time that article is cited. 9

10 To modify alerts Click on My Tools then Saved Searches & Alerts. Click on Citation Alerts, then tick the box next to the alert you want to delete, and select Delete. LibGuide This information is also available at: 10