Author-level metrics measure the impact of the scholarly output of a single researcher. Author-level metrics are designed to help researchers assess the cumulative impact of their work, rather than the impact of a single publication. All author-level metrics are derived from article-level metrics: they aggregate or summarize the impact of an author's publications.
*Resources that are controversial. Please refer to the "Controversial Tools" tab.
h-index: measures the cumulative impact of a researcher's output by looking at the number of citations a work has received
i10-index: created by Google Scholar, it measures the number of publications with at least 10 citations
g-index: aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to highly-cited articles
e-index: The aim of the e-index is to differentiate between scientists with similar h-indices but different citation patterns
For more information on these and additional metric options, visit Publish or Perish and Metrics Toolkit.
As a "general rule of thumb:
"However, the reverse is not necessarily true. If an academic shows weak citation metrics, this may be caused by a lack of impact on the field, but also by one or more of the following:
Source: Anne-Wil Harzing, Publish or Perish
Citation analysis is a quantifiable measure of academic output. Users need to be aware of the limitations and incongruities of citation metrics. Library subscription databases and Google Scholar do not correct errors in citing papers. This means that one paper may be cited many different ways and appear as separate entries in these tools. Also, author and institutional naming inconsistencies complicate these analyses. Comparisons between these tools should be avoided. The databases use different sources to generate data and some are more comprehensive than others.
The Author Citation Report in Web of Science will generate an h-index, total number of publications, sum of times cited, and citing articles in both a text and graphical format. The report also includes a breakdown of each publication, cites per year, and average citations of that publication per year. Caveat: this data is extracted from Web of Science publications, so it is recommended to also use one of the other author-level metrics tools for a more comprehensive view of an author's work.
Adapted with permission from the University of Oklahoma Research Impact Metrics research guide.
Your Google Scholar profile will include a list of the articles you have entered, with "cited by" links for each of them. Google Scholar will display a graph of your citation activity and calculate your total number of citations, h-index, and i10-index. The profile also includes a "recent" version of those three metrics, based on activity in the last five years.
click "My Profile" at the top and either login to your Google account (or create a new one)
you will be prompted to enter some brief biographical information
add your articles and decide how to handle updates
Note that your profile is private by default. You can opt to make it public on your profile page.
Mendeley is a reference manager and academic social network. Creating a profile allows researchers to interact with colleagues and track some metrics on the use of their work. Please note that although Mendeley was purchased by Elsevier in 2013, it uses Scopus to generate its metrics and include non-Elsevier materials.
Use Publons (available within Web of Science) to track your publications, citation metrics, peer reviews, and journal editing work in a single profile. Your publications will be imported from Web of Science, ORCID, or your citation manager (e.g. EndNote or Mendeley), along with citation metrics from the Web of Science Core Collection. Download a record summarizing your scholarly impact as an author, editor and peer reviewer.
Academia.edu and ResearchGate both seem attractive to scholars, but they also have their share of disadvantages and downsides. We think it is especially important to place these two sites into context and preface them with important considerations.
Similar to many other academic social networks, you are not the customer when you interact with these companies, even though you may feel like one. Instead, you are the product that these services seek to monetize and/or “offer up” to advertisers. We do not fault businesses for making money; that is the imperative for them to exist. But we also see Academia.edu and ResearchGate as an extension of those who monetize what many scholars believe should be freely shared. Importantly, if these companies are bought, sold, or go out of business, what would happen to the content you have placed there? This is one reason why it is advisable to first upload items you want to share – articles, preprints, postprints, conference posters, proceedings, slide decks, lesson plans, etc. – to SURFACE, SU’s institutional repository where you can deposit your work. The items in SURFACE are indexed by Google and Google Scholar, so they are searchable, findable, and downloadable by researchers around the world. SU Libraries maintains the platform, the content, and the links. Most importantly, maintaining and preserving content is one of the core missions of SU Libraries. We are not going out of business, so your content on SURFACE will not go away either.
Another consideration with these particular services is the legality of uploading your work to these platforms. Most publishers require authors to sign a publication agreement/copyright transfer prior to a manuscript being published, which outlines what you can/cannot do with your own work in the future. Uploading your work – especially a publisher’s pdf – to a site such as Academia.edu or ResearchGate may be a violation of the terms of the publishing agreement, whereas uploading it to an institutional repository may not be (or can be negotiated not to be). Several years ago, a major academic publisher actively went after Academia.edu, requiring them to take down all of the publisher’s content that had been illegally uploaded, much to the surprise and dismay of the authors. And Academia.edu is not the only target. In 2018, ResearchGate was set to take down nearly 7 million articles or about 40% of their content.
Finally, some of these sites’ tactics are troubling from the standpoint of privacy and intellectual freedom. Personally and professionally, many find it distressing that a private company, which does not adhere to the same professional ethics as librarians and other scholars do, collects information about who is reading what. Academia.edu, in particular, then offers to share that information with you if you subscribe to their “premium service.” And while their analytics dashboard does not reveal readers’ names, it may provide enough information for you to know exactly who read your work. You may decide not to pay for Academia.edu’s premium service, but even so – what you view and download will still be tracked. This may not be troubling to you (the “I’m not doing anything wrong, so I don’t care” argument), but we think it sets a bad precedent. What about tracking researchers who study terrorism? Or whistleblowing? Or even climate change? How might people at these academic social media companies create profiles and make judgments about you based on what you are reading? And what will they do with the information they collect, especially if asked for it by government entities?
Adapted with permission from the University of Oklahoma Research Impact Metrics research guide.
*Controversial Tool (go to the Controversial Tools tab for more information)
Academia.edu (like ResearchGate) is designed to be an online research community with a social network component. You can upload papers and follow other scholars. Before uploading any of your papers, please ensure that you have permission from the publisher to do so. This falls under "Green" Open Access for author self-archiving. Remember your audience will likely run into a paywall in accessing this content. Additionally, Academia.edu does not offer traditional metrics but does show document and page views. Please note that, although the site has an .edu domain, it is not associated with an educational institution.
*Controversial Tool (go to the Controversial Tools tab for more information)
ResearchGate (Iike Academia.edu) is designed to be an online research community and functions as a social network for researchers. Users can share updates about their research and full papers, and they can follow others to receive updates about their works. In addition to reads, citation counts, profile views, and h-index, ResearchGate has its own metric called RG score. As it is created by a propriety algorithm, it is not clear how this number is generated; therefore, it should be used only cautiously.