Scholarly Communications

• Author-level metrics look at the citations to an author's work identified in datasets from citation-tracking tools such as Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar.
• These metrics are proxies for the influence and prestige of the author's research. 
• Author-level metrics are often used in hiring, tenure, promotion, and evaluation, and can also be used in grant applications.  
• Like other impact metrics, author metrics can be hard to comparing between disciplines, don't differentiate between quantity and quality of citations, and can provide incentive for self-citation to inflate the metrics. 

Types of Author Metrics

These are common author metrics you'll see.

Citation Counts

• These are basic calculations of citations to an author's published work. 
• Citation counts will vary based on the underlying citation dataset used for the count. 
• Different services will provide different counts and might include cumulative totals, totals over a period of time, total per year, or average citations per article. 
• Available in Scopus and Google Scholar.

h-Index

• The h-index is measured as the highest number of articles (h) published by an author that have been cited at least (h) times. 
  • So an h-index of 5 means that an author has 5 articles that have been cited at least 5 times. 
  • A higher number is more valuable as it shows more articles with more citations. 
• The original h-index was designed to measure an author's whole career, but there are versions that limit to a specific time period. 
• An author's h-index may vary based on the tool used to calculate citations since they are working with different citation datasets. 
• What would be considered a good h-index will vary by different disciplinary citation expectations. 
• Available in Scopus and Google Scholar.

i10-Index

• The i10-index measures the total number of publications an author has with at least 10 citations. 
• The i10-index can be cumulative or measured over a limited period of time. 
• What would be considered a good i10-index will vary by different disciplinary citation expectations. 
• Available in Google Scholar.

Viewing and Updating Your Author Profile

• Start by identifying your author page in Scopus. Since Scopus identifies authors algorithmically, you may find more than one page was created.
• Use the resources below to understand and update your author profile.

Author Metrics

• To see your citations counts and h-index, select Analyze Author Output on your profile page.
• The resources below will take you through how to access, analyze, and track author metrics. 

Citation Overview

• You can also select to see a citation overview for your profile, documenting citation totals and linking to every citation to your work. 
• You can adjust what citations are included in the overview. 
  • You can select which date range to look at. 
  • You can filter your citations to exclude self citations, self citations from all authors including co-authors, and citations from books. 
• Scopus will also provide an h-index for the selected citations with a link to the h-graph. 
• If you want to do your own calculations, you can export the citations as a csv file to the upper right of the graph. 

Viewing and Editing Your Author Profile

• Start by setting up a Google Scholar profile. 
• After your profile is created, go to your profile using the My Profile link from the Google Scholar homepage.
  
• Google Scholar will automatically identify articles you published and citations to them. You can also manually add articles to your profile. 

Author Metrics

• On the upper right of your profile, you will see your citation metrics. These include:
  • Total citations
  • h-index
  • i10-index
• All metrics will include counts for all time and the last five years.
• Below that is a graph of citations by year going back 8 years. Click the graph to bring up a graph covering all years.  
   
• Click the View All link to see all of the citations included in the metrics.