Research Impact & Metrics
- Responsible Use of Metrics
- Online Author Profiles
- Journal Rankings & Metrics
- Author Metrics & Altmetrics
Increasing Your Impact
You can make your work more discoverable and visible by
- creating and maintaining a researcher profile
- archiving your work in a research repository to make it more accessible
- joining a research network or community to maximize your research impact
h-index
The h-index is the most widely used author metric. The h-index was developed by J. E. Hirsch (2005) as "an estimate of the importance, significance, and broad impact of a scientist’s cumulative research contributions.”
Simply put, the h-index is the number of papers (h) that have received at least h citations. For example, an author with 5 papers that have received at least 5 citations each has an h-index of 5. An author with 19 papers that have received at least 19 citations each has an h-index of 19.
- What is the h index?Want to learn more? Bernard Becker Medical Library has a wonderful guide.
The h-index isn't the only author metric. There are many more, including the g-index, m value, and i10.
Sources for Author Metrics
- Dimensions (free version) Free version available. Dimensions covers millions of research publications connected by more than 1.7 billion citations, supporting grants, datasets, clinical trials, patents and policy documents. Dimensions is a Digital Science product and included Altmetric information.
- Lens (free version) Lens serves over 200 million scholarly records, compiled and harmonized from Microsoft Academic, PubMed and Crossref, enhanced with OpenAlex and UnPaywall open access information, CORE full text, and links to ORCID. The full scholarly citation graph is provided for the first time as an open public resource.
LSU Libraries does not have a subscription to Web of Science, but authors can create an account (free) to view their profiles, including their metrics.
Other Measures of Impact (Altmetrics)
Altmetrics is a term used to describe alternative metrics used to measure research impact. Altmetrics can paint a more complete picture of an individual's research impact. Instead of relying on citation counts, altmetrics include things like downloads, tweets, references in the popular press, etc. Both PlumX and Altmetrics include policy document citations.
PlumX Metrics is integrated into LSU Digital Commons, Mendeley, and Science Direct.
- Last Updated: Jan 9, 2025 10:55 AM
- URL: https://guides.lib.lsu.edu/metrics
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