Know the Quality of your Research

If you want to know the impact or quality of your research, you should use Citation Analysis. It is process by which the quality of a research article is assessed by counting the number of times other authors mention it in their work i.e., it involves counting the number of times a research article is cited by other works.

H-Index is one specific method or metric to measure an author’s productivity and citation impact. This index is based on the set of the author's most cited research papers and the number of citations that these papers have received in other publications. It can be more clearly understood by this example, an h-index of 25 means the researcher has 25 papers, each of which has been cited 25+ times. The theoretical details of how this index is defined and calculated is given on this link (click here).

There are a number of resources that identify cited works and calculates H-Index, automatically, namely: Google Scholar, Scopus, and many more. The most used of them are discussed below,

1. Google Scholar provides citation information for research papers found within their database.  Google Scholar can find more citations because it indexes more journals and more publication types compared to other databases. To use this service, you need to login with your gmail account on the google scholar page. Follow the instructions on the screen to set up your profile.   After completion, this will show the details on number of citations of your articles by other documents in Google Scholar and your h-index will be provided.  You will be given a choice whether to make your profile public or private.
2. Scopus provide citation information for articles indexed within it (limited to article written in 1996 and after).   It lists more than 15,000 journals from over 4,000 international publishers of all the disciplines. To use this service you need to login to scopus website. The scopus login requires the institute’s authentication. So, if your institute is not registered with scopus, you can’t access it. But if you don’t have scopus login, you can preview the limited service through this link (click here).

As per my experience, using Google Scholar is easy and more informative. Registration on Google Scholar is free, it has larger database and it also provides information on one more index i10 Index, simultaneously, that indicates the number of academic publications an author has written which have at least ten citations from others.

The h-Index was proposed by Hirsch, who has estimated that after 20 years a "successful scientist" will have an h-index of 20, an "outstanding scientist" will have an h-index of 40, and a "truly unique" individual will have an h-index of 60. However, he points out that values of h-index will vary for different fields.

Enjoy judging yourself on an International Platform.

Nidhika