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Scholarship Metrics with a Google Scholar Profile

1. Create your profile

  • Go to  and sign in to your Google account (or create one).
  • Go to 
  • Fill out the fields
    • Name - make sure it matches the form you use when you publish.
    • Affiliation - type in MGH Institute of Health Professions
    • Email - use your IHP email address
    • Areas of Interest - use keywords (not narrative text) to describe your research areas
    • Homepage - link to your directory page on the IHP site, unless you have another website you use to promote your scholarship.

2. Add your publications

After clicking Next Step, Google will provide a list of citations it thinks belong to you.  Read through the list and deselect any that are not yours or you do not want included in your profile. You will also have the option to add any you do not see on the list.

3. Start Building your Network

  • Make your profile public (use the edit function next to "my profile is private").
  • Add co-authors (Google will suggest some of these)

 

Once you populate your profile with your publications, it will automatically show you how many citations each publication has in Google Scholar as well as calculate your h-index.

What is an h-index

The h-index assigns a scholar a number to quantify the level of impact their work has had.

More specifically, "h" equals the number of papers that have been cited “h” number of times. Therefore an h-index of 20 means the author has published at least 20 papers that have been cited at least 20 times. The higher “h” is the broader the author’s impact.

Finding your h-index with Scopus

You probably already have a Author Profile, but it may be incomplete or incorrect. To check your profile and the documents associated with it, go to the Author Profile look-up.

After searching for your name, you'll find something that looks like this.

You'll find your document and citation counts as well as your h-index in the area in the green circle.

You can scroll down the page to look at all of the articles associated with your name, and then check to make sure it recognizes all of the variations on your name in the area in the pink circle. If you need to submit change requests use the link in the blue circle.

If your profile requires many changes, you may want to help out by using the Author Feedback Wizard.

If you are a  user, you can find your Scopus h-index that way as well. You'll just need to connect your Scopus ID in your Mendeley profile.

Journal Metrics

There are several competing journal metrics measures.  Below are a few that do not require a subscription.

 The librarians at Treadwell also have access to the Thomson Reuters' (the old guard) measure for this.  You can send a request and ask for it through Treadwell's Ask Us! service.  If you send them a list of your articles, they can also use the same database to find your author h-index (which will be slightly different from your Google Scholar h-index, because it uses a different group of journals to collect the number of times you've been cited).

Article Metrics

The best article level metrics we have are Citation Counts, meaning how many times other articles have cited yours.  Your h-index gives you an overall picture of how frequently your articles have been cited, but you may also want to see the citation counts for each of your articles.

There are several databases that offer these counts, and since there are limitations to all of them, reporting more than one is usually wise.

Google Scholar

Search for any article, and look for the Cited by number. Be aware that many people think Google's counts are inflated.


Ovid Medline 

Select the Title radio button and type your article title into the search box. Click on the Find Citing Articles link on the right side of the page next to your article listing. Note: this count only includes articles within Medline.


CINAHL Database

Search for the title of your article.  Look for Times Cited in this Database (if you do not see that at the bottom of your citation, then you article hasn't been cited by others in CINAHL). Note: this count only includes articles within CINAHL.