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Measuring Research Impact

An introduction to some commonly used metrics for determining the influence of published research.

Publication Count

Measuring author impact begins with looking at the publication count, or the number of academic publications he or she has written.

Publication Count

Advantages Limitations
  • Snapshot of raw productivity (assumes more publications = better)
  • Does not look at the quality of the contribution
  • May be difficult to distinguish authors with the same name
  • Encourages "salami" or least publishable unit publication

 

h-index

The h-index was devised by Prof. Jorge Hirsch, a physicist.

Individual researchers are assigned h-index score, which is supposed to reflect influence more accurately than other metrics do.

h-index scores are computed in this way: An author's publications are ranked according to the citations they received, from highest to lowest. The h-index score is that point in the ranking which equals the number of citations the item has received. So, if an author having 11 citations to the 11th publication in the list would have an h-index of 11.

  • Scopus allows the ranking of author's publications by number of citations and so allows the direct computation of the h-index score.
Advantages Limitations

Provides a number to quantify scholarly activity

Attempts to balance publication count and citation counts

Not an absolute value, as citation counts can vary depending on the source searched
(h-index in Scopus may be different than the h-index from Google Scholar or Web of Science)