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Measure Your Research Impact-h-index, impact factor and more

Facts about an author's h-index:

  • Proposed by JE Hirsch in 2005.

  • A tool to measure an author's productivity and impact of published work.

  • Based on the researcher's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received (were these two numbers meet).

  • Calculation

    • An author's publications are organized in descending order (most cited to least cited).

    • The h-index is where the two numbers meet (e.g. article 6 was cited at least 6 times-see example below).

Read the original article by Dr Hirsh 'An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output': https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0507655102

To calculate Albert's h-index we need to:

  1. Collect all of Albert's publications.

  2. Put the publications in order from highest citation count to lowest count.

  3. Determine where the number of publications (h) and the citation counts meet.
    For example:
    Have I published one publication with at least one citation count? Have I published two publications with at least two citation counts? Continue to ask the question until you can't answer yes to the question.

Below are Albert's 8 scientific publications in order by citation count.

Publications      No. of citations

Publication 1      15
Publication 2      12
Publication 3      12
Publication 4        8
Publication 5        7
Publication 6      6
Publication 7        5
Publication 8        4

Albert has a total of 8 publications; 6 publications have at least 6 citations.

Symplectic Elements at Cincinnati Children's

Anyone with a profile in Symplectic can easily find their h-index. This is based on the claimed publications in a person's profile. Once a publication is claimed it might take a day or two to update the calculation. 

  1. First make sure that all of your complete list of publications (journal articles) are in the profile. Claim or reject all pending publications (please note you will need to wait a day for the h-index to recalculate).
     
  2. Go the the Home tab, under My Summary refer to the h-index box. The h-index reported in the three resources:
    • Scopus
    • Dimensions-a new tool purchased by Cincinnati Children's
    • Europe PMC

Scopus

  1. Click on the link above and logon to UC.

  2. In Scopus, click on the Author search tab. Enter the author's last name, first name or initials and click on the search icon.

  3. Check the boxes next to the names that match the author that you need and click Show documents.

    Make sure that all of the articles listed are the correct and check the boxes.

    If all the articles are correct check the Select all box and click on View Citation overview.

  4. The h-index can be found to the right of the citations.

Google Scholar

You can see your h-index in Google (using your gmail account) by creating a profile of all your articles found in Google Scholar. To get an idea of what it looks like here is Albert Einstein's h-index.

Click here for specific instructions: https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html 

Please note: Databases like Scopus include an h-index but do not index every journal so often an h-index number will vary. Depending on the discipline you may be better off using one database over the other.