Skip to Main Content

Measure Author Metrics

Ask Us: Chat, email, visit or call

Get assistance

The library offers a range of helpful services. All of our appointments are free of charge and confidential.

Book an appointment

What are author metrics?

Author metrics are measures that determine the impact of an author’s research.

What is the h-index?

The h-index of a researcher is the highest number of publications with at least that number of citations
For example: a researcher has an h-index of seven if he/she has seven publications with at least seven citations

H-index
Measures both the productivity and the impact of a researcher

What are the benefits of the h-index?

It is not affected by a single highly-cited publication
It is calculated by citations to an article, not to the journal it is published in, which is a more accurate representation of the author’s impact
It can be used to calculate impact of groups of researchers, departments, and institutions
Available on Web of Science, Google Scholar

What are the limitation of the h-index?

Limited by total # publications, so it’s not as beneficial to early-career researchers, and publishing pace varies between disciplines
No inclusion of informal mentions (ex. Social media, news, blogs)

What is Egghe’s g-index?

Puts more weight on highly cited papers
Not as widely accepted as h-index

What is i10 index?

Number of publications with at least 10 citations
Free and easy to calculate
Only used in Google Scholar

Google Scholar
A search engine for articles, theses and reports produced by academic publishers, universities, and preprint depositories
Dates of Coverage: All Time Periods

Help with...

Resources to help with metrics

More help

Publish or Perish
Software program that gathers citations from Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to calculate various author metrics

Suggest an edit to this guide

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.