Research Impact: Citations and Metrics

Author metrics are measurements that are used to track how often an author's work is cited, and indicate the reach and impact of an author's work which can be used to support performance reviews and applications for grants and promotions.

An author's impact can be demonstrated by the following measures:

• Total number of research outputs and those in top citation and top journal percentiles
• Number of citations to publications
• Field-weighted and category normalized citation impact
• h-index
• Number of collaborations with international, interdisciplinary or industry partners
• Benchmarking against other researchers
• Number of patents and/or number of research articles referenced by patents

The CNCI, calculated from data indexed in the Web of Science is often used as an indication of author impact and is normalised to allow for comparisons of publications comprised of different subject areas, ages and document types. The CNCI can also be used to indicate article or organisational level metrics.

The “CNCI of a document is calculated by dividing the actual count of citing items by the expected citation rate for documents with the same document type, year of publication and subject area” (Clarivate 2021).

A CNCI value of one is on par with the world average, values above one are considered above average, and values below one are considered below average.

Clarivate (2021). Indicators Handbook: Normalized Indicators. https://incites.help.clarivate.com/Content/Indicators-Handbook/ih-normalized-indicators.htm?Highlight=Category%20Normalized%20Citation%20Impact%20#

Find a Category Normalized Citation Impact

1. Log in to Incites (Clarivate) using your Web of Science, EndNote Online or ResearcherID account details.
2. Under the Analyze drop down menu at the top of the screen, select Analyze by > Researchers:

3. At the top of the screen under the Person ID Type Group menu, select from Wos Author Record, Unique ID or Name and enter the relevant search terms:

4. Refine your results if needed using the Filters box on the left of the screen:

5. The CNCI can be found on the far right of the table:

The h-index (or Hirsch index) (Hirsch, 2005) measures both the productivity (number of publications) and impact (number of citations) of publications and can apply to a group of scientists, an institution or a country, enabling researchers to compare their work with others in the same discipline.

Different disciplines require their own measures for h because of differing citation patterns. For example, h-indices in medicine are much higher than in mathematics so the h-index alone should not be used as a measure of research quality.

A scientist has an index of h if h of their papers have at least h citations each. For example, a h-index of 5 means that 5 publications have received at least 5 citations each.

Hirsch, J. E. (2005) An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. PNAS 102 (46): 16569–16572.

Within CSIRO, the Web of Science is the main resource for measuring both citations in the scientific literature and author metrics including the h-index. The h-index can also be found in Scopus and Google Scholar. 

To calculate your h-index using Web of Science:

1. Log in to Web of Science and choose the All Databases search. Select the Documents tab, choose Author from the drop down menu and type in the author's name e.g. Parkinson, P*. You can also add a date range if you wish:

2. Check that the publications listed are for the correct author. You can delete any publications incorrectly associated with your profile via the My publication records page (ensure you are logged in). Note that the h-index will change as you delete publications.
3. Select the Citation Report option from the top right of the screen:

4. The h-index is located on the far right of the screen: