Calculate an Author's H-Index

The h-index is an indicator of the number of highly cited citations an author has among their total published work.  Simply put, an h-index of h is the number of papers an author has that have at least h citations, so an author with an h-index of 10 has at least 10 papers that have received over 10 citations.  An intuitive graphical representation is shown here.  This calculation is used so that articles that are highly cited or have not yet been cited do not disproportionately weight the overall score.

To calculate the score, go to the ISI Web of Knowledge webpage, click on the Web of Science tab, and enter the author's name in the correct field.  A good way to enter an author's name is last name, first initial followed by an asterisk (*).  Once the search has been conducted, click on the Create Citation Report link at the top of the search results.  This will take you to a report page that has the h-index calculated for you.  How high of a h-index can you find?  The highest I could find was 212.

Google Scholar also has a way to calculate an h-index, however, a Google account is required and this approach is more tailored to calculating your h-index.  At the main Google Scholar page, there is a link at the top right called My Citations.  Click the link and login.  This leads you to a wizard where you fill in your details and add papers to your My Citations list.  After all your papers are added, an h-index is calculated.  Best wishes for a strong h-index!

Find out how many times a paper has been cited

Today I discovered that not only did someone else read one of the papers I published, but they also cited the paper!  This made me curious: How many others have cited this paper or other papers I have published?  A quick search led me to the ISI Web of Knowledge.  I may be mistaken, but I believe your institution needs a subscription to be able to use this service.  Once there, go to the ISI Web of Science tab and then click on Cited Reference Search.  Fill in the appropriate fields to customize you search and press the Search button.  This should bring up your paper or papers of interest and the number of citations each paper has received.  One option I was particularly impressed by were the citation maps that show forward and reverse maps of citations up to two generations.  Alternatively, if you don't have a subscription to ISI Web of Knowledge, Google Scholar is another resource that provides citation information.  Just search for your article of interest and the search result for the article should have a small cited by link on the lower left of the entry indicating the number of articles that have cited the current article.  Follow the link to get a list of all the articles that have cited the original paper.  Hope you are excited as I was to know how many citations your papers have received.