Author research metrics measure the uptake and impact of your research and provide quantitative evidence of your performance in an academic field. They are used by evaluative frameworks for university rankings and can help to support your grant applications and submissions for academic promotion.
You can use a combination of indices from different platforms to demonstrate the citation uptake of your research. Which tool you use and which figures work best for you will depend on your discipline, the stage of your research career and the type of research output you commonly publish.
Scholarly output
Scholarly output is the number of research outputs you have published. It is a useful indicator to demonstrate your overall research output and productivity.
Considerations
H-index
H-index is a widely used metric that attempts to measure both your productivity and your citation impact. It is a measure of the number of citations and the number of outputs.
How is it calculated
The h-index is the number (h) of your papers that have received (h) citations each. For example, if you have 26 published outputs that have each been cited at least 26 times, your h-index is 26. This index demonstrates that you have a range of papers with high citation levels rather than one or two outliers with very high citations.
Source: 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. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0507655102
Similar indices
Considerations
Average citations for a set of documents
Both SciVal and Web of Science provide a metric for measuring the average number of citations a set of documents has received.
In SciVal it is called Citations per Publication.
In Web of Science it is called Average Citations per Item.
Using either all your published outputs, or outputs from a selected time frame; the average is calculated by dividing the total number of citations received by the number of published outputs.
This metric is often displayed in a chart or table by year; when this is the case, these are always the years in which an output is published, not the years in which the citations were received.
Considerations
Field Normalised Citation Impact
Field Normalised Citation Impact is used to measure the citation performance of your research against the global average for your field. It allows for the differences between disciplines, type of published output and the expected lower citation rates on your most recent publications.
Category Normalised Citation Impact (CNCI)
In the Clarivate/InCites platform this metric is called Category Normalised Citation Impact (CNCI). InCites reports the average of your CNCI figures using the Web of Science categories assigned to your article. This can be displayed as a table showing the CNCI by each category relevant to you. CNCI can also be reported as an author-level metric by applying the calculation to a set of documents.
Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)
In the Elsevier/SciVal platform, this metric is called Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI). SciVal reports an overall FWCI for you as a researcher, and displays individual figures for each article in a table format. SciVal defines your field by the subject codes it has assigned to the journal in which your article was published.
How is it calculated?
Field Normalised Citation Impact at an author level compares the number of citations received by all your publications to the average number of citations received by similar publications.
For example, 2.11 means 111% more than the global average and 0.87 means 13% less than the global average.
Considerations
Outputs in Top Citation Percentiles
This metric measures how many of your outputs are present in the most-cited percentiles of all articles in the world. It shows what percentage of your published articles are in the top 1%, 5%, 10% or 25% worldwide. This analysis can be shown as the raw data, or with field-weighted calculations applied, so it minimises the bias towards highly cited disciplines. InCites calls this metric Documents in top 1% and 10% and provides the number of articles and the percentage of your entire publication list that fall in the nominated percentile.
Publications in Top Journal Percentiles
This metric relates to the number of your outputs that have been published in the world's most highly-cited journals. Unlike the Outputs in Top Citation Percentiles figure, this ranks the overall citation performance of the journal, and then calculates the number of your outputs that appear in these high ranking journals. This can demonstrate your publishing output in Q1 journals (Quartile 1 = Top 25%). Further explanation of this metric here.
Considerations
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