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Publish or Perish: Author metrics

Harzing's Publish or Perish tracks scholarly citations and calculates a number of citation and impact statistics

Metrics

Below you see the metrics in an example that are available via PoP. Some of the moste common are explained or linked..

  • Publication years
  • Citation years
  • Papers: total numbers of papers
  • Citations: total number of citations
  • Cites/year: average number of citations per year since first paper
  • Cites/paper: total citations/total papers
  • Cites/author: divide citations for each publication by the number of authors and sum the resulting citations; this is the single-authored equivalent number of citations for the author in question
  • Authors/paper: average number of authors per publication for a certain author
  • h-index
  • g-index
  • hI,norm
  • hI,annual
  • Papers with ACC >= 1,2, 5,10,20

    ACC = annual citation count (= citations / years_since_publication)
    ACCn = number of articles with an annual citation count >= n
    The various ACC levels are subsets of each other; all articles in acc10 are also part of acc5, acc2, and acc1; etc.

See also: https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish/tutorial/metrics/

h-index

A scholar 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.
An H-index of 45 means that a scholar has published 45 articles, each of these articles have been quoted at least 45 times.

g-index

The g-index is an alternative for the older h-index, which doesn’t average the numbers of citations. The h-index only requires a minimum of n citations for the least-cited article in the set and thus ignores the citation count of very highly cited papers The g-index can be seen as the h-index for an averaged citations count.

g-index looks at overall record

A g-index of 20 means that a scholar has published at least 20 articles that combined have received at least 400 citations. However, unlike the h-index these citations could be generated by only a small number of articles. For instance a scholar with 20 papers, 15 of which have no citations with the remaining five having respectively 350, 35, 10, 3 and 2 citations would have a g-index of 20, but a h-index of 3 (three papers with at least 3 citations each).

Roughly, the effect is that h is the number of papers of a quality threshold that rises as h rises; g allows citations from higher-cited papers to be used to bolster lower-cited papers in meeting this threshold. Therefore, in all cases g is at least h, and is in most cases higher.[1] However, unlike the h-index, the g-index saturates whenever the average number of citations for all published papers exceeds the total number of published papers; the way it is defined, the g-index is not adapted to this situation.

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