Counting Your Citations
The h-index
The h-index is a measure of "citedness" as a surrogate for productivity and impact. It is the number of articles h in a group of publications N that have received h or more citations. For example, an h-index of 20 means that there are 20 items in the selected group N that have received 20 or more citations. It is like a median, and useful because it discounts the disproportionate weight of highly cited and uncited papers that would skew a mean. However, the h-index will vary considerably depending on a person's number of credited publications and the length of time they've been active: older and more prolific authors will usually have higher h-indexes than younger or less prolific authors. If you want to compare your h-index to someone else's, you need to use the same methodology to calculate them and then normalize the values by dividing them by a second factor, e.g. years since PhD. The standard caveats apply when using h-indexes in personnel and funding decisions.
The Quick Method: General Search
This method is easiest and works fine for most purposes. Its drawbacks include:
- It excludes articles that are not in ISI-covered source journals (such as conference papers, book chapters, patents, etc.) or that were published before 1965 (the year UT's subscription to WOS begins).
- It may be difficult to distinguish among authors with the same surname/initial(s), so it may include stray hits.
- It relies on the articles' derived "Times Cited" values that may undercount your total actual citations. (Here's an example)
- Connect to Web of Science.
- Open the Citation Databases menu in the lower part of the window, and de-select all but "Science Citation Index Expanded" and (optionally) "Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Science".
- Enter your last name and first initial, followed by an asterisk (*) in the Author search box. If you always use a middle initial on your papers, include it as well [jones ab*]. Click Search.
- Unless your name is very unique, the results will include papers by other persons with the same name and initials. To increase precision, click the "Institutions" tab under the Refine menu and select any/all institutions that you have been affiliated with. Important: the form of entry of institution names varies. Be sure to view the entire list, sort it alphabetially, and select from that to make sure you get them all. Then click Refine.
- Once you have a results list that looks fairly accurate, click on Create Citation Report. The Citation Report ranks the results in descending order of citations received, and provides a year-by-year summary of citations, a sum of Times Cited, an average citations-per-article figure, an option to remove self-citations, and the h-index for this set of articles. Browse the entire report, and mark and remove any entries that don't belong there.
- To avoid having to repeat the above process every time you want to see your citations and h-index, consider registering for a ResearcherID within Web of Knowledge. This allows you to claim a unique ID number for yourself and then attach it to all your publications. After that, you can get regular updates and reports, and avoid the Author Name problem when you want to look yourself up.
A More Thorough Method: Cited Reference Search
With this method you start with your complete publications bibliography, and look up each individual paper in turn as a cited reference. It's tedious, but the advantage is that you will probably get higher total citation numbers than you would using the quick method above. The limitations: Citation data are scanned and entered into WOS as printed; any errors in the original citation will be replicated in the database. The Cited Work abbreviation is standardized when possible, and the citation is parsed for tabular entry and indexing of these fields: Cited Author, Cited Work, Year, Volume, and Page. This method does not calculate an h-index; you would have to enter the citation totals into your own spreadsheet to determine it.
- Click on the Cited Reference Search tab.
- Prefer searching on the paper's FIRST AUTHOR whenever possible, even if you're not the first author.
- Cited author names are indexed by surname, followed by up to two initials; full given names are not used. Using a * wildcard symbol after the first initial is highly recommended. Example: PAULING, L* You can use a middle initial if you want to, or when it's necessary to narrow down a search on a common surname (ex.: SMITH, DK).
- Watch out for other authors with identical names and initials. If your name is a fairly common one, your papers will be mixed in with those of other authors with the same name, and you'll have to filter these out manually.
- Lengthy surnames, Asian names, and compound names can be problematic. The ISI databases enter cited authors exactly as they appear in the citing papers, so misspellings, typos, and inversions are very common. It's advisable to try searching several different variants to make sure you find as many as possible. For example, if your name is Richard Smith-Jones, try SMITHJONES, R*; SMITH-JONES, R*; JONES, RS; etc. Try to anticipate how citing authors might misstate or misinterpret this kind of name. WoS limits the author surname to 15 characters.
- Leave the Cited Work search box blank, because you will miss entries that have errors or variants in this field. Enter the year in the Cited Year field. Click Search.
- When you pull up the index list of cited articles, note carefully the variant and erroneous entries of individual papers, and select all likely matches. Some entries will lack volume or page numbers, and some will have variant cited work abbreviations or incorrect or inverted vol/page numbers or years. You must use your judgment to determine which are likely matches and which are not.)
- If the paper does not appear in the Cited Reference index at all, this means it has not been cited in an ISI source publication.
ISI tracks citations from various sources. The bulk come from the 6650 Source Journals covered in Science Citation Index-Expanded. (You can browse and search a list of Source Journals by following the link next to the Cited Work search box.) In 2009 ISI added citation data from its Conference Proceedings Citation Indexes, which increased overall citation numbers.
If a citation to one of your papers is in a publication not covered by ISI, that citation will not be represented. Examples of citations not covered are those in: books, dissertations, patents, web pages, etc. On the other hand, it does not matter where the cited document appeared -- only where the citing paper was.
- Add up the Citing Articles numbers in the Index list for each entry that matches the paper in question. This the total citation figure.
Why stop here? If your paper was published before 1965 and you mark the desired entries and click FINISH SEARCH, you will probably retrieve a smaller number of citations. The Index entries reflect the totality of the Web of Science database, including the Proceedings indexes and SCI records back to 1900, while the actual search results include only those from our subscribed portion of Science Citation Index, i.e. from 1965 forward. If you do choose to finish the search, don't use the SELECT ALL option -- this will eliminate "duplicates" and will also result in a lower count.
- If you want to remove self-citations (papers where you cited your own previous work), you can do this using the Advanced Search mode. First, select all desired entries from the Index list and click the Finish Search button. Then, click on Search and search your name as Author (not Cited Author). Finally, go to Advanced Search and combine these results with your previous hit set using the NOT operator: "#1 NOT #2".
- You can set up a Citation Alert in Web of Science. This allows you to register and receive an email alert when a new citation to a particular paper is added to the database.
Other Citation Tools
Google Scholar includes a "Cited by" count in its display of individual entries. This is calculated from citations appearing in other publications indexed in Google Scholar. Clicking on this link will take you to a list of citing articles.
A Google Citations Gadget uses Google Scholar data to calculate an h-index for an author name. However, the metric is only as good as the underlying data. It is not a reproducible figure and will differ - sometimes significantly - from data found in Web of Science. Google indexes a different, wider (and largely unknowable) universe of publications. Google's article and citation metadata are also messier than in Web of Science, and there is no way to resolve author name conflation.
