Scholarly Publishing

Author metrics are ways in which one can determine that influence and productivity of an author or researcher.  An author's impact is determined by many factors, including how often they are cited and in what types of journals they are cited.  There are also non-traditional factors, including links to author's works on websites, types of press choosing to publish an author's work, and what repositories contain copies of an author's work. 

h-Index The h-index, or Hirsch index, measures the impact of a particular scholar 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.

NOTE: 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,  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.)  

For more information on the strengths and disadvantages of this measurement, see One h-Index to Rule them All?

Find Your H-Index

• Web of Science select author from the drop down menu and enter the name of the author in the top search box (e.g. Smith JT).  Click on Search. To ensure accuracy for popular names, you can also add a research domain and a organization to your search and then click on finish search. Click on  'Create Citation Report' on the right hand corner of the results page.  The H-index is on the right of the screen
•  Google Scholar.:Using your google (gmail) account, create a profile of all your articles captured in Google Scholar.  Follow the prompt on the screen to set up your profile.   Once complete, this will show all the times the articles have been cited by other documents in Google Scholar and your h-index will be provided.  Its your choice whether you make your profile public or private but if you make it public, you can link to it from your own webpages.
• Harzing's Publish or Perish  The software program uses Google Scholar to retrieve and analyze academic citations to present statistics on citations, journal metrics, and author metrics. After searching by your name, deselect from the list of articles retrieved those that you did not author.  Your h-index will appear at the top of the tool.  Note:This tool must be downloaded to use

By Chessor (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Make Sure Your Research is Associated to You!

Many people have similar names and names can change.  Make sure that your research is identified with you by establishing an ORCID and using it across platforms.  When it comes to establishing your h factor you'll be glad you did.

Major repositories and publisher systems. e.g. Web of Science, have systems to disambiguate authors. The major ones include:

ORCID  vendor-neutral author identification, intended to work across platforms

ResearcherID is Thomson Reuters unique identifier and is used in Web of Science.

Scopus Author Identifier: (Elsevier) unique researcher identification. 

arXiv Author ID (Cornell)

eRA Commons Username  (National Institutes of Health)

OpenID this is a relatively new identification and appears to be aimed at identities in the commercial space, not intended to be used as to disambiguate between researchers and scholars.