Measure Your Research Impact: Author Impact

More information about Google Scholar Citations and Publish or Perish is shown in the boxes to the right.

Researchers are frequently asked to demonstrate the impact of their work for the purposes of grant applications or promotions. Here are a few ways you can show your impact:

Create a citation report:

• A comprehensive list of your publications and the number of times those publications have been cited

Calculate your h-Index:

• A measure of the cumulative impact of a researcher's publications
• Attempts to measure both quantity (number of publications) and quality (number of citations received)
• The h-index is the number of papers (h) that have received h or more citations.  An h-index of 3 means that an author has 3 articles that have each received 3 or more citations.

Caveats

• Different results will be obtained, depending on what resource is used to create a citation report and determine an h-index.
• When doing an author search, make sure that all name variations are searched. For example, search with and without a middle initial.

Google Scholar Citations is a feature of Google Scholar that allows you to monitor citations to your articles.  Citation information is extracted from the scholarly articles within the Google Scholar database and from U.S. patents in the Google Patents database.  Google Scholar is a subset of Google that is designed to search for scholarly publications, including journal articles, theses, books and reports.  Documents retrieved from Google Scholar should be verified for accuracy.

Google Scholar Citations provides:

• Total number of citations
• h-index
• Graphs of citations over time

To get started, you need to create a Google Scholar Citations author profile:

• Sign in using your Gmail address and password OR
• Create a Google account using a different email address
• Add articles to you author profile

 Click here to learn more about viewing citations and obtaining citation metrics for articles in your profile.

List of University of Nebraska-Lincoln Google Scholar Profiles

Source: Yale Medical Library, https://library.medicine.yale.edu/tutorials/1343

Publish or Perish is a free, downloadable software program that retrieves and analyzes citations from Google Scholar and, to a limited degree, Microsoft Academic Search.

Publish or Perish provides an interface to search Google Scholar and allows you to choose the documents to include in the citation analysis.  Google Scholar searches for journal articles, theses, books, reports and other scholarly literature.  Documents retrieved from Google Scholar should be verified for accuracy.

Once you have selected the documents that you wish to analyze, Publish or Perish will provide:

• Total number of documents
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per document and per year
• h-Index

Results from Publish or Perish can be exported  to a citation manager (e.g. RefWorks or EndNote) or a CSV file, which can be opened in Excel.