Subject Guides: Measuring Your Research Impact: Author Impact (h-index)

What is an h-index?

The h-index is an index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. The index attempts to measure both the scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist. It is based on the set of the researcher's most cited papers and the number of citations that was received through other people's publications.

Below is an example of how this author's h-index has been calculated:

Citation Analysis: Google Scholar

Search for cited references in Google Scholar, which provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles.

You can check who is citing your publications, produce a graph for the citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name, e.g., Professor Roy Maartens, SKA/ SARChI Professor in Atronomy & Astrophysics, UWC.

Find your h-index using Google Scholar

Google Scholar Citations
Using your google (gmail) account, create a profile of all your articles captured in Google Scholar. This will show all the times the articles have been cited by other documents in Google Scholar. Its your choice whether you make your profile public or private but when you make it public, you can link to it from own webpages. Your h-index will be automatically calculated.

Citation Analysis: Scopus

Citation analysis involves counting the number of times an article is cited by other works to measure the impact of a publicaton or author. There is no single citation analysis tool, however, that collects all publications and their cited references. For a thorough analysis of the impact of an author or a publication, one needs to look in multiple databases to find all possible cited references. Scopus and Google Scholar can be used to identify cited works as illustrated below.

Find your h-index using Scopus

Click on the Author search tab. Enter the Author's name in the search box. If you are using initials for the first and/or second name, enter periods after the initials (e.g. Smith J.T.).
To ensure accuracy, enter University of the Western Cape in the affiliation field.
Click Search and then on the relevant profile. Under the Research section, you will see the h-index listed. If you have worked at more than one institution, your name may appear twice with 2 separate H-Index ratings. Select the check box next to each relevent profile, and click Show documents.

View Author Metrics in Scopus video below:

Harzing's Publish or Perish (PoP)

Publish or Perish searches Google Scholar. After searching by your name, deselect from the list of articles retrieved those that you did not author. Your h-index will appear at the top of the tool. Note:This tool must be downloaded to use.

Measuring Your Research Impact: Author Impact (h-index)