Highlights on various tools for author metrics

1. Dr. Mallappa Vijayakumar MSc., MCA., PhD.
University Librarian
CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF RAJASTHAN राजस्‍थान‍के न्‍द‍रीय‍विश्‍िविद्यालय‍

3. Author level metrics is a system/standard for measuring
the authors or evaluation of authors. Author-level
metrics are citation metrics that measure the bibliometric
impact of individual authors, researchers, academics, and
scholars. Other metrics originally developed for academic
journals can be reported at researcher level, such as the
author-level eigenfactor and the author impact factor.
Author Level Metrics

4.  Project Grants
 Invited Speaker
 Consultancy
 Career Advance
Benefit of Author Level Metrics

5. Author level Metrics can be categorized in to
 Article-level metrics
 Journal-level metrics
 H-index, i10-index, g-index, Altmetrics and others
 Scientometrics
Category

6. There are several measures of author impact. They include
 Total number of publications
 Total number of citations for all publications
 Average number of citations
 Number of citations for a particular publication
 Number of citations for a particular period
 Number of reading/visit
 Number of downloads
 Number of request for the articles
Article Level Metrics

7. There are several ways to measures the Journal
 Journal Impact Factor
 SCImago Journal Ranking
 And others
Journal Level Metrics

8. Journal impact factors are found in Journal Citation
Reports (JCR). JCR is a unique database which is used
to determine the relative importance of journals within
their subject categories.
An impact factor is one measure of the quality of a
journal. This is calculated by the number of citations
received by the journal, from other journals within the
database.
Journal Impact Factor
Number of citation received by “X” Journal in “A” the year
Journal Impact Factor =
Number of article published by same “X” Journals in previous two years of “A”

9. Five things to know about impact factors
 Not all journals have impact factors. They must be
indexed in the database like Web of Science to have
an impact factor
 A journal has only one impact factor, but it may be
listed in more than one category
 A journal impact factor should not be looked at in
isolation, but in comparison to other journals in the
same category
 Impact factors vary across disciplines
 A five-year impact factor may also be used in some
disciplines.
Journal Impact Factor

10. SCImago journal Ranking
SCImago Journal uses Scopus database to compare
journals. It is freely available on the web. The Journal
Rankings tab allows you to retrieve a list of journals
within a subject area or category.
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR indicator) is a measure of
scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for
both the number of citations received by a journal and
the importance or prestige of the journals where such
citations come from. A journal's SJR is a numeric value
indicating the average number of weighted citations
received during a selected year per document published
in that journal during the previous three years. Higher
SJR values are meant to indicate greater journal
prestige.
SJR is updated twice a year.

11. h-index
The h-index is a popular metric. It was developed by J.E.
Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California.
An index to quantify an individual's scientific research
output i.e., 'An entity has an h-index value of y if the
entity has y publications that have all been cited at
least y times'. (Hodge & Lacasse). Thus, the h-index
reflects both the number of publications and the number
of citations per publication. The index is designed to
improve upon simpler measures such as the total
number of citations or publications. The index works
properly only for comparing scientists working in the
same field; citation conventions differ widely among
different fields.

12. i10-index
The i10-Index, used solely by Google Scholar, was
introduced in July 2011. It calculates the number of
academic publications an author has written that have at
least ten citations from others. This is one way to gauge
the productivity of an author.
i10-Index = the number of publications with at least 10
citations.

13. g-index
Harzing's Publish and Perish Manual explains the g-index
is calculated based on the distribution of citations
received by a given researcher's publication.
A set of papers has g-index , if g is the highest rank such
that the top g papers have together at least g2 citations.
Also means that, the top g+1 papers have less than
(g+1)2 papers.
For example: If an author is having g-index of 20 means
that author has published at least 20 articles
that combined have received at least 400 citations.
One of the main advantages of the g-Index is the
inflated values of this index helps give credit to lesser
cited or non-cited work whilst attributing credit for
highly-cited papers.

14. Altmetrics
'Altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics
based on the Social Media Tools for analyzing, and
informing scholarship'
Altmetrics (alternative metrics) has emerged due to the
limitations of traditional citation metrics such as the
impact factor, providing complementary evidence
of research impact. 'Altmetrics' is a very broad category
that includes diverse measures that can range from a
news story to a Facebook like.
If you have an account or profile with any social network
service (Flickr, Facebook, Academia.edu, etc.), you will
be familiar with 'likes', 'downloads', 'views', 'shares' and
similar indications of interest in your activity.

15. Altmetrics
Pros Cons
Immediacy
Unlike citations, which take time
to accumulate, impact can be
assesed in real-time
Potential for manipulation
The openness of social media
provides the opportunity for artifical
inflation of figures
Track impact outside the formal
publishing network
Can measure the impact of a
wider variety of scholarly
communication channels such as
datasets, presentation slides,
pre-prints, videos and websites
Popularity of social media services
Comparisons of figures from a
specific tool (e.g. Twitter) for
material published at different times
can be affected by fluctuations in
the number of users
Assess reach beyond scholarly
citing community
Capture evidence of engagement
in broader society e.g.
practitioners, undergraduates,
general public including the
impact of influential but uncited
work
Acceptance
These measures and their role in
measuring impact are evolving and
have differing levels of acceptance
in the scholarly community

16. Publish or Perish is a software program created by
Anne-Wil Harzing of University of Melbourne. The
program analyses your Google Scholar raw
citations and presents you with a variety of
statistics, including
• total number of citations
• total number of references
• average number of references
• h-index
• g-index
Publish or Perish

17.  Degree of Collaboration
 Lotka’s Law and others
Scientometrics

18. The degree of collaboration is defined as the ratio of the
number of collaborative research papers to the total
number of research papers in the discipline during a
certain period of time(Subramanyam). It is expressed as
Nm
C =
Nm+Ns
where; C is the degree of collaboration in a discipline. Nm
is the number of multi-authored research papers in the
discipline published during a year. Ns is the number of
single authored research papers in the discipline published
during a year.
Degree of Collaboration

19. Lotka’s law describes the frequency of publication by authors in
any given field. It states that the number of authors
making ’x’ contributions in a given period is a fraction of the
number making a single contribution, the
formula ”1/xa” where a nearly always equals two, i.e., an
approximate inverse-square law, where the number of authors
publishing a certain number of articles is a fixed ratio to the
number of authors publishing a single article. As the number of
articles published increases, authors producing that many
publications become less frequent. There are 1/4 as many
authors publishing two articles within a specified time period as
there are single-publication authors, 1/9 as many publishing
three articles, 1/16 as many publishing four articles, etc. Though
the law itself covers many disciplines, the actual ratios involved
(as a function of 'a') are discipline-specific.
The general formula says XnY=C or Y=C/Xn, where X is the
number of publications, Y the relative frequency of authors
with X publications, and n and C are constants depending on the
specific field (n~2).
Lotka’s Law

20. Requirement for Author Metrics
To assess the we need Digital Author ID like;
• ORCID ID
• Scopus ID
• Researcher/ Publon ID
• Google Scholar ID
• Others

21. Tools for Author Metrics
There are many tools to assess the Author Metrics
• Google scholar
• Web of Science
• Scopus
• Publish or perish
• And others

22. Conclusion
 It is worth remembering that the key measuring tools
(databases) only gather data from the journals they
index.
 Author naming inconsistencies can lead to missed
citations
 Citation culture varies across discipline and not be
comparable
 Publication Culture
 Researcher career is have different stages
 Author metrics Impact does not always equal to
excellence
 Scholarly communication is evolving beyond the
citations
 Factors affecting citation rates include type of article (eg
review articles are more highly cited than editorials),
Language, Refutation, Citation bias or self-citation,
Subject area, Publication schedule, Journal reputation

23. Mail to librarian@curaj.ac.inCall to +91-9430702887

24. CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF RAJASTHAN राजस्‍थान‍के न्‍द‍रीय‍विश्‍िविद्यालय‍
Dr. Mallappa Vijayakumar MSC., MCA., PhD.
University Librarian