Measure Your Research Impact: Author Impact

Learn how you can track your citations, create a citation report and calculate your h-index

Researchers are frequently asked to demonstrate the impact of their work for the purposes of grant applications or promotions.

Here are a few ways you can show your impact:

Create a citation report:

• A comprehensive list of your publications and the number of times those publications have been cited

Calculate your h-Index:

• A measure of the cumulative impact of a researcher's publications
• Attempts to measure both quantity (number of publications) and quality (number of citations received)
• The h-index is the number of papers (h) that have received h or more citations.  An h-index of 3 means that an author has 3 articles that have each received 3 or more citations.

Scroll down or click on the links in the box on the left to learn how to measure your impact.

Web of Science is a citation database that indexes journals, conference proceedings and books in the health and natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities from 1900 to present. 

Create a citation report and determine your h-index

Search for citations by author.  There are two methods to do this:

• Method 1
• Enter the author's last name, followed by the initial of the first name, into the search box on the homepage. 
• Select Author from the drop-down menu to the right of the search box. 
• To narrow your results, enter affiliation information.  Click Add Another Field below the search box.  Enter affiliation information and choose Organization-Enhanced from the drop-down menu.
• Click Search.
• Method 2
• Select Author Search from the drop-down menu next to Basic Search. 
• Enter the author's name and choose a research domain and organization (it is not necessary to select a research domain and organization, but doing so will narrow your results).

Method 1

Method 2

Place results on a Marked List:

• The results will display journal articles, books and conference proceedings that match your search.  Be aware that due to similar author names, you may see works that you did not author.
• On the results page, select the publications that you wish to include in your citation report by clicking on the box next to the record.
• Click Add to Marked List at the top of the results page.

Create Citation Report:

• Once you have added all the publications you wish to include in your citation report to the Marked List, click on Marked List at the top of the results page to access your list.
• Click Create Citation Report.
• The Citation Report provides aggregate citation statistics and calculates the h-index for the publications on your Marked List.
• To export your Citation Report, choose Text File or Excel File from the Send to drop-down menu at the bottom of the page.

Web of Science Results with Marked List and Create Citation Report

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Scopus is a citation database that indexes journals, trade publications and conference proceedings in the health and natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities with citation data available from 1996 to present.  Scopus does not have complete citation information for articles published prior to 1996. 

Create a citation report and calculate your h-index

Search for citations by author:

• Click on the Author search tab on the Scopus homepage
• Enter the author's last name and initials or first name into the appropriate search boxes
• Enter affiliation information in the search box, if you so choose
• Click search

Scopus Homepage

Select documents to include in citation report:

• Scopus will display a list of authors that meet your search criteria.  Your name may appear more than once.  Documents with insufficient data may not be matched to an author.  To show these documents on results page, click Show Profile Matches with One Document at the top of the results.
• To view documents for a particular author, click on the box next to the author name and then, click on Show documents at the top of the results

Create Citation Report:

• On the document results page, select the documents that you would like to include in your citation report.  To include all documents, click on the box next to All at the top of the results.
• Then, click View citation overview at the top of the results
• The citation overview displays the number of times each document has been cited
• Click on View h-Graph to view the h-index for the documents in the citation overview
• To export your citation overview, click the Export link in the upper right-hand corner of the page

Scopus Results Page

View Author Details:

• Run an Author search (see above)
• On the author results page, click on the name of the author whose details you would like to view
• The Author details page displays
  • Affiliation
  • Number of documents published (that are indexed in Scopus)
  • Total citations
  • h-Index

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Google Scholar Citations is a feature of Google Scholar that allows you to monitor citations to your articles.  Citation information is extracted from the scholarly articles within the Google Scholar database and from U.S. patents in the Google Patents database.  Google Scholar is a subset of Google that is designed to search for scholarly publications, including journal articles, theses, books and reports.  Documents retrieved from Google Scholar should be verified for accuracy.

Google Scholar Citations provides:

• Total number of citations
• h-index
• Graphs of citations over time

To get started, you need to create a Google Scholar Citations author profile:

• Sign in using your Gmail address and password OR
• Create a Google account using a different email address
• Add articles to you author profile

 Click here to learn more about viewing citations and obtaining citation metrics for articles in your profile.

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Publish or Perish is a free, downloadable software program that retrieves and analyzes citations from Google Scholar and, to a limited degree, Microsoft Academic Search.

Publish or Perish provides an interface to search Google Scholar and allows you to choose the documents to include in the citation analysis.  Google Scholar searches for journal articles, theses, books, reports and other scholarly literature.  Documents retrieved from Google Scholar should be verified for accuracy.

Once you have selected the documents that you wish to analyze, Publish or Perish will provide:

• Total number of documents
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per document and per year
• h-Index

Results from Publish or Perish can be exported  to a citation manager (e.g. EndNote) or a CSV file, which can be opened in Excel.

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