Measuring and Increasing Your Research Impact

h-index

The h-index, or Hirsch index, measures the impact of a particular scientist 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 (Schreiber, 2008a)." The h-index is included in Web of Science. 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.

g-index

Proposed by Egghe in 2006 to overcome a bias against highly cited papers inherent in the h-index. The g-index is the "highest number of papers of a scientist that received g or more citations, on average" (Schreiber, 2008a).

i10 -Index

Created by Google Scholar and used in Google's My Citations feature. i10-Index = the number of publications with at least 10 citations. This very simple measure is only used by Google Scholar, and is another way to help gauge the productivity of a scholar.  

Immedicacy Index: The average number of times a journal article is cited in the year it is published. Can be useful for comparing journals on cutting edge research.

Journal Impact Factor: The annual JCR impact factor is a ratio between citations and recent citable items published. Thus, the impact factor of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years." (from an essay originally published in Current Contents June 20, 1994)

Journal Self-Citation: A self-citation is a reference to an article from the same journal. Self-citations can make up a significant portion of the citations a journal gives and receives each year.

Related Journals: Calculated using the number of citations from the selected journal title, total number of articles in the related journal and total number of citations from the citing journal. Uses the number of citations from one journal to another to determine a relationship.

Self-Citation: The practice of self-citation can be considered at many levels, including author self-citation, journal self-citation, and subject category self-citation.