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Scholarly Impact

Author Metrics

What

Author-level metrics are citation metrics that measure the bibliometric impact of individual authors. H-index is the best known author-level metric. Since it was proposed it has gained a lot of popularity amongst researchers while bibliometics scholars proposed a few variants to account for its weaknesses.

Applications

  • Enhance researcher profiles and promote research to potential collaborators 
  • Benchmark productivity for performance reviews 
  • Support promotion or award applications 
  • Support grant or other funding applications and progress reports
Metric Definition
h-index The h-index was developed by J.E. Hirsch and published in Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(46), 16569-16572. The h-index is an author metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of an author. A researcher has an h-index of N if they have published N papers, each of which has been cited in other papers at least N times.
g-index The g-index was proposed by Leo Egghe and published in Egghe, L. (2006). Theory and practise of the g-index. Scientometrics, 69(1), 131-152. It adds more weight to highly cited articles. The g-index is often used alongside the h-index to provide a more comprehensive picture of a researcher's impact, especially for highly cited individuals.
Average Citations The number of citations received by a researcher, divided by the number of publications produced by the researcher.
Total Citations The number of publications a researcher has listed on their profile.
i10 index The number of articles published by a researcher that have at least 10 citations each.

Considerations

  • Author-level metrics can be limited in scope and may not accurately reflect the full impact of research, especially for early-career researchers (e.g., the h-index does not account for the career span of the author - because it is a simple function of productivity and impact, authors with longer career spans (and more publications) will always have higher scores).
  • Author-level metrics can be biased towards certain publication types (e.g., some publication types, like journal articles, may be more likely to receive citations than others).
  • The interpretation of author-level metrics can vary depending on the field of research and the type of research output. The h-index does not reflect the significance of the research impact or the societal relevance of the findings, which can be especially important in the health sciences.
  • Tools that provide author-level metrics, such as Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, can only gather metrics based on the publications they index.
  • Researchers may inflate their h-index by citing their own work excessively, which can distort the metric’s integrity.