Research Impact

J. E. Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego, introduced the h-index in 2005 as a way of characterizing a researcher's impact. H is defined as the number of papers that have that have been cited H or more times; for example, a researcher with an h-index of 12 has published 12 papers that have been cited 12 or more times.

There are several software programs and databases that you can use to calculate your h-index.

Web of Science (WoS)

Search for an author by name, then click "Create Citation Report":

There are several things to keep in mind when using WoS in this way:

• again, there is a lack of transparency regarding data collection and analysis
• citation counts are not accurate proxies for influence
• can be gamed (via practices like self-citation, citation networks, etc.)
• only articles published in journals indexed in WoS are included in the author's total number of publications
• only articles published in journals indexed in WoS that cite the author's articles included in the total number of publications are included when calculating the sum of times cited and counting the number of citing articles
• an h-index of 3 means that this author has 3 articles that have been cited 3+ times
• the average number of citations per item can be misleading (in this case, it is, since one of the author's five articles was cited 288 times)
• researchers in the humanities and social sciences will have lower h-indexes, according to WoS

Google Scholar

Go to your author profile:

Your h-index in Google Scholar may be different than your h-index in WoS. This is a result of the difference in what journals are indexed in WoS and what is included in Google Scholar's coverage. Many of the same warnings listed above for WoS also apply to Google Scholar.

ScholarWorks

You can create an Author Page and include works created at any time in your career, before and/or during your tenure at UMass Boston, and your campus website Profile Page may contain a direct link to your ScholarWorks Author Page.

In addition to WoS and Google Scholar, researchers can use Publish or Perish, Kudos, and/or Scholarometer to calculate metrics such as the h-index. Researchers can also register with ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) to facilitate ease of data collection and ensuring you are credited for your work via author name disambiguation.