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RESEARCH GUIDES

Bibliometrics and Altmetrics: Measuring the Impact of Knowledge

This guide includes information on which of the databases contain citation measures that can be used to gage either an author, article or journal impact.

DEFINITION: h-Index

The h-Index, or Hirsch index, measures the impact of a particular scientist rather than a journal. "It is defined as the highest number of publications of a scientist that received h or more citations each while the other publications have not more than h citations each." For example, a scholar with an h-index of 5 had published 5 papers, each of which has been cited by others at least 5 times.

See instructions on this page for finding the h-Index using Web of Science, and Publish or Perish, which is downloadable from Harzing.com.

Note that an individual's h-index may be very different in different databases. This is because the databases index different journals and cover different years. For instance, Scopus only considers work from 1970 or later, while the Web of Science calculates an h-Index using all years that an institution has subscribed to. (So a Web of Science h-Index might look different when searched through different institutions.)  

Source: Schreiber, M. (2008). An empirical investigation of the g-index for 26 physicists in comparison with the h-index, the A-index, and the R-index.  Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(9), 1513.

Limitations of the h-index for early career researchers

Find an h-Index

Getting started with...
  1. Web of Science
  2. Publish or Perish
  3. Google Scholar

      

     Video tutorial explaining how to find h-Index in Web of Science. 

Note: Jump to 2:45 minutes on the video to start watching the section about Web of Science.

Find an h-Index in WEB OF SCIENCE

 Watch the video tutorial or follow the instructions below:
  1. Go to Web of Science from Database Finder (If you are off-campus, login using your directory ID and password).
  2. Click on Author Search under Basic Search tab.
  3. Enter the name of the author (e.g. Smith JT), Research Domain, and/or Organization.
  4. Click on Finish Search.
  5. Click on Create Citation Report on the right hand corner of the results page, the h-Index is on the right of the screen.
 

Find an h-Index in GOOGLE SCHOLAR

This tool requires a gmail account. A Google account is necessary to create a research profile. Follow the instructions on Google's page and add all your articles captured in Google Scholar.  This will show all the times the articles have been cited by other documents in Google Scholar.  It is your choice whether you make your profile public or private but when you make it public, you can link to it from your own webpages and in email messages.

See Albert Einstein's.

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Find an h-Index in PUBLISH OR PERISH

The Publish or Perish site uses data from Google Scholar. An explanation of citation metrics is available here.

Publish or Perish is available in Windows and Linux formats and can be downloaded at no cost from the Publish or Perish website.

Once you have downloaded the application, you can use Publish or Perish to find h-Index by entering a simple author search.  

 Watch the video tutorial or follow the instructions below:

  1. Open the application from your Start menu.
  2. Type in the author's name.
  3. Click on Lookup on the top right corner.
  4. The h-Index will display on the results page.
  5. You can narrow your search results further by deselecting individual articles. The h-Index will update dynamically as you do this.

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