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Scholarly Publishing

Important information for faculty and student authors

Author Metrics- H-Index

By Chessor (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Who are you?

Many people have similar names and names can change.  Make sure that your research is identified with you by establishing an ORCID and using it across platforms.  When it comes to establishing your h factor you'll be glad you did.

Major repositories and publisher systems. e.g. Web of Science, have systems to disambiguate authors. The major ones include:

ORCID  vendor-neutral author identification, intended to work across platforms

ResearcherID is Thomson Reuters unique identifier and is used in Web of Science.

Scopus Author Identifier: (Elsevier) unique researcher identification. 

arXiv Author ID (Cornell)

eRA Commons Username  (National Institutes of Health)

OpenID this is a relatively new identification and appears to be aimed at identities in the commercial space, not intended to be used as to disambiguate between researchers and scholars.  

H-Index: A Measure of a Scientist's Impact (Med. College of Wisconsin)

Google Scholar Citations

  • Google Scholar Citations is a tool that can be used to maintain a list of your publications. This list can be used to create a public profile of your research for sharing with others. It will also provide metrics for your publications such as citation counts, h-index, and i10-index.
  • You will need to a Google Account to use Google Scholar Citations. Once you have logged in to your Google Account, go to the Citations sign up form.
  • Be sure to include your full name as it will be used in the next step to find your publications. If you entered your full name, you should see a list of potential publications to add to your profile. You may also see a few groups of publications based on alternate versions of your name.

  • You can add, edit, or delete publications from your list.

How to use Google Scholar Citations (HKUST Library)

Definitions

Altmetrics: Altmetrics go beyond normal citation metrics to include alternative impact measures including downloads, views, blogs and, tweets.  Altmetrics expands the community of comment beyond the limits of bibliometrics. 

Article Influence: The Eigenfactor score divided by the number of articles published in journal.  "I know how impactful the journal as a whole is, but what about the average individual article in the journal?"

Article Level Metrics:  Impact measures at the article level, e.g. number of citations to a specific article.

Author Identities:  Codes that identify the works of an author as distinct from an author with the same or similar name.

Author Impact Factor: The impact of a specific author based on the number of citations over time.  h-index is an example of an author impact factor. 

Bibliometrics: in the context of impact factor, measures of citations at the journal and article level.

Cited Half-Life: "The cited half-life is the number of publication years from the current year which account for 50% of current citations received."  (Ladwig and Sommense)

g-index: Proposed by Egghe in 2006 to overcome a bias against highly cited papers inherent in the h-index. The g-index is the "highest number of papers of a scientist that received gg2 or more ciations" (Schreiber)

Google Scholar Metrics:  

Author Metrics: Google provides its own calculations for an author's h index, including a number of variations based on it's indexed content.

Journal Metrics: Lists top publications based on their "five-year h-index and h-median metrics." 

h-Index:  Proposed by J.E. Hirsch in 2005 the h-index is intended to serve as a proxy of the contribution of an individual researcher. The h index is calculated through a formula that considers the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. 

i10-index   Introduced by Google Scholar in 2011 the i10-index measures an authors publications with at least 10 citations. 

Immediacy Index: The average number of times a journal article is cited in its first year.  Used to compare journals publishing in emerging fields. 

Impact Factor: a measure of often a journal or specific author is cited. The intent is to assign a number as a proxy for the contribution of a publication or researcher to the field. 

ORCID: Open Researcher and Contributor ID, a researcher identification system not tied to a specific vendor. The ORCID is intended to disambiguate author/researcher names across publishers and across all areas of contribution.

ResearcherID: the author identification system supported by Thomson Reuters. 

Self-Citation: referencing one's own publications. There is nothing wrong with citing one's own research but is not considered as meaningful as citations by others. 

Many of these definitions are used with the kind permission of Robin Sinn and John Hopkins University or from the University of Michigan.