Citation Searching for Tenure and Promotion: Researcher Impact

A unique, numerical researcher ID:

• brings together all published variants of your name
• distinguishes between researchers with the same name

The two most widely recognized unique ID systems are ORCID and ResearcherID

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID):

• A non-profit, open source registry of unique identifiers for researchers
• Create a scholar profile 
• Link to your other identifiers (for example, LinkedIn, ResearcherID)
• Export to altmetrics accounts, like Impactstory
• Search for other researchers in the registry. 
• Give proxies permission (i.e. grad students, staff) to add to your profile

Include your ORCID ID number in all of your research output such as papers, protocols, datasets, articles, presentations and patents.

more information: ORCID@UGA

• A Clarivate Analytics product
• Works seamlessly with other Clarivate Analytics products, Web of Science and EndnoteWeb. 
• Add citations from other sources as an RIS file.
• Create a scholarly profile
• A graphical display provides a selection of metrics and charts summarizing citations by year and publication characteristics.
• Links with ORCID

ResearcherID on Publons Help

In addition to simple citation counts, more sophisticated measures of researcher impact have been devised.  Each has their own advantages and limitations. These are some of the more commonly used measures, but many more have been proposed.

H-index:  Measures productivity and impact. An index of h means that your h most highly-cited articles have at least h citations each.  It doesn't factor in the length of a researchers career, a single highly cited paper, or self citations, and it ignores order of authorship. Average impact scores vary widely from discipline to discipline.  It has been the most widely used index, but others have been created to address potential weaknesses, including:

The hi-index (AKA individual h-index) takes number of co-authors into account. In its simplest formulation, your hi-index is equal to your h-index divided by the average number of authors on the articles in your h core.

The hc-index (AKA contemporary h-index) weights newer articles more heavily than older articles, which allows a clearer picture of more recent levels of productivity and impact.

The m-index takes differences in career length into account, by dividing your h-index by the number of years that you have been publishing.

G-index:  The g-index gives added weight to highly cited papers, unlike the h-index. An index of g means that your g most highly-cited articles together have at least g-squared citations. Your g-index will always be equal to or greater than your h-index.

i10-index:  Developed by Google Scholar, it's the number of publications with at least ten citations.

NOTE: A citation search in each of these tools may retrieve different results, in which case the respective h-index calculations will differ as well.

Google Scholar: To calculate your h-index and see trends in your impact across time, create a public or private profile. Unlike other databases, Google Scholar provides citation information not only for journal articles but also for conference papers and books.  

Publish or Perish: Free downloadable software, which uses information from Google Scholar to calculate h-index and several h-index alternatives.  View sample search result.

Scholarometer: Install this browser (Firefox or Chrome) extension and search for an author to receive a list of articles, number of citations, h-index, and h-index alternatives based on information from Google Scholar.  View a sample search result.

Web of Science: (GALILEO database): Search Authors.  This will generate a page showing the author's publications as well as a variety of author metrics including the H-Index as well as the Author Impact Beamplot.  Clicking View Citation Report will provide additional detail.