Measuring Research Impact: Getting Started

Q: When looking for citation counts or h-index, is it better to use Web of Science, Scopus, or Google Scholar?

A: Since each indexes different content, it is a good idea to search all three, export the results into citation managers, and remove all duplicates.  You may also want to consult discipline-specific databases that offer citation data.

Publish or Perish is downloadable software program that uses data from Google Scholar to calculate a variety of metrics, including the h-index:

• Total number of papers and total number of citations
• Average citations per paper, citations per author, papers per author, and citations per year
• Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
• Egghe's g-index
• The contemporary h-index
• Three variations of individual h-indices
• The average annual increase in the individual h-index
• The age-weighted citation rate
• An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting into other applications) or saved to several other formats.

Advantages:

• Accesses a wide range of data not covered by other tools
• Better coverage of books, conference proceedings than WoS or similar tools

Disadvantages:

• No list of journals or other materials indexed
• No indication of time period covered
• Notably poor coverage of material only in print
• Duplicates have to be removed manually
• No means to distinguish between authors with the same initials

Publons allows you to track your publications, citations, and contributed peer reviews in one dashboard. Publons also calculates your h-index (and displays all data on a public-facing dashboard). Publons is part of Web of Science Group.