http://users.path.ox.ac.uk/~library/AuthorCitationAnalysis.htm

To analyse an author’s citation frequency & h-index

You have two options

· Using the ISI citation index at www.isiknowledge.com/. This is branded for biomedical sciences as “Web of Science”™, within “Web of Knowledge”™ (which comprises all scholarly subjects.). This is a subscription-based service, which Oxford University Library Services pays for and makes available from all ox.ac.uk terminals, or those that are VPN-enabled. Disadvantages include:

o Does not cover citations to books, book chapters, dissertations, theses, working papers, reports, conference papers, and journal articles published in non-ISI journals

o About 70 – 80% Chemical, Biological, Physical and Medical/Health sciences publications by all Australian universities in these fields, were in ISI listed journals

o Cited Reference counts citations to non-ISI journals only towards first author, not other authors

o poor aggregation of minor variations of the same title (e.g. typos in referencing)

o very limited coverage of non-English sources

· a newer approach based on advanced Google Scholar search (free), using the freeware Publish or Perish (“PoP”), being developed by Tarma Software. It is very simple to download and install, and quite simple to run. But you must use it intelligently. Disadvantages include:

o Google Scholar includes some non-scholarly citations

o Not all scholarly journals are indexed in Google Scholar. GS doesn’t disclose its coverage

o in the Natural and Health Sciences Google Scholar's journal coverage seems to be very patchy. Lower coverage than in Web of Science, especially in Chemistry.

o Google Scholar does not perform as well for older publications

o Google Scholar’s processing is done automatically without manual cleaning and hence sometimes provides nonsensical results. But GS is committed to fix mistakes

o GS is not updated as often as Web of Science – perhaps about once every 3 months

For both systems, names with diacritics (“ö”, “ê”, etc) or apostrophes or ligatures ("fi", "fl",) are problematic.

These cautions are taken from Harzing, A: “Google Scholar - a new data source for citation analysis”, which repays reading. It contains important critiques of the h-index[1] and modern variants of it. See also Bar-Ilan, J (2008) Which h-index? - a comparison of WoS, Scopus and Google Scholar, Scientometrics, 74: 257-271

Procedure using ISI citation index

1. Do the usual citation search on an author at Web of Knowledge: 
Ensure you use the Web of Science tab

For example:

For example:

 

Procedure using Publish or Perish

1. Download and install PoP. You need Administrator rights on your computer.

For example:

There’s no one-button exclusion of self-citations as there is in WoS.

Within PoP there’s excellent Help on Author Impact Analysis. Gives very clear step-by-step procedure. Use it.

 

Alternatives:

Google Scholar on its own, without Publish or Perish, gives powerful quick intuitive searching, ranking results by citation frequency. But it doesn’t calculate the summary statistics on these citation frequencies, nor does it let you remove self-citations. 

Scopus also performs citations but does not calculate citation statistics.

 

SVHunt 14 Mar 2008 [e-mail]

 k:svhuntlab&researchvisitsfut projdunnlibrary_svhonlyauthorcitationanalysis.doc

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[1] A Scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other
(Np – h) papers have no more than h citations each