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Research Impact and Academic Profile Management

This guide supplements the Research Impact Assessment services provided as part of Research Services and Digital Strategies unit.

Author-level Metrics

Author-level metrics are presented usually to demonstrate scholarly output of that individual. Institution affiliation associated with an author are used to create co-authorship or collaboration maps but this is not considered a metric but a visualization of the relationships of an author (or group of authors).

The two most common indexes for author output is:

h-index calculation: "A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np − h) papers have no more than h citations each." [For details in calculation, see Hirsch, 2005]

m-index calculation: the h-index divided by the number of years from the point of first publication

Limitations:

  • h-indices tend to be higher in disciplines with high output with many references (e.g. medical sciences) whereas in disciplines where publications are fewer and longer in length (e.g. social sciences, art, humanities)
  • high-interest topics often lead to high h-indices
  • publications written in English tend to receive more citations than those in other languages, contributing to higher h-index
  • certain document types tend to be more cited (e.g. reviews) than others, contributing to higher h-index

**These limitations indicate that this metric is not normalized for discipline citing behaviours and so should not be used for comparison purposes.**

 

SOURCES FOR h-Index

Search by author name and select 'Citation Report' in results

Search by author name and see h-index in author results

Search by author and see h-index in Overview or Benchmarking