As an author, you will be asked to demonstrate the impact of your research in a variety of contexts such as job applications, promotions, research evaluation activities (e.g. PBRF) or grant applications. There are many ways of measuring the impact of a researcher, both within their discipline and beyond. Within the research community research impact has traditionally been centered around the number of citations your work has attracted by other research publications. Citations only reveal part of your impact story, so if possible, avoid using a single metric, and ideally use a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures to tell the story of your research impact.
One of the most common and simple measures of a researcher's citation impact is the h-index. Unlike many measures of impact, once you understand how an h-index is calculated you can quickly identify an authors h-index by viewing the number of publications and how many citations those publications have attracted.
h-index = number of papers (h) with a citation number ≥ h.
Example: If an author has an h-Index of 5, it means that 5 of their publications have at least 5 citations.
The simplicity of the h-index is one of its limitations. The responsible use of metrics recommends that it is important to understand the limitations of the metrics that we use to measure impact. H-index counts citations but it does not measure the importance of those citations, or the contribution any author made to any given publication. Citation practices vary widely between disciplines (and often between sub-disciplines) and as such the h-index cannot be used to compare researchers publishing in different subject areas or researchers at different stages of their career.
H-index can be found in a number of databases. You will find it varies depending on the size of the database and whether self-citations are included. Two common sources are:
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyse and visualise research.
A search tool which allows searches across many disciplines and sources. By accessing Google Scholar from this site, any search results which are part of a Library subscription will be indicated by the Find@Waikato link.
Note: in order to view an authors h-index in Google Scholar they need to create a Google Scholar profile.
There are many other more complicated metrics that attempt to overcome some of the limitations of the h-index, one such metric is the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI).
FWCI is calculated using the ratio of the citations received, and the average number of citations received by similar publications. It compares papers in the same discipline, the same publication age, and of the same type. For example, Economics Review papers published in 2023 will be compared with all others. FWCI is normalised meaning an author who receives a FWCI of 1.00 has research outputs performing as expected for the global average. A FWCI of below 1.00 is performing below expected, and above 1.00 performing better than expected. One of the key limitations of FWCI is that it is easily skewed by outliers, especially for a researcher with a small number of publications.
For assistance, reach out to the Open Research Team at library@waikato.ac.nz.