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Assessing Impact: Metrics, Altmetrics and Impact Factors

This guide highlights important metrics used to measure journal impact, author impact and article impact.

Author Level Metrics
 


Hirsch’s h-index (Available from multiple platforms)

 Single-number metric of an academic's impact, combining quality with quantity. 
 

Egghe’s g-index

 Aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to highly-cited articles.
 

Contemporary h-index 

Gives more weight to recent articles, thus rewarding academics who maintain a steady level of activity.
 

Age-weighed citation rate (AWCR) and AW-index

Measures the average number of citations to an entire body of work, adjusted for the age of each individual paper. 
 

Individual h-index (original)

Divides standard h-index by the average number of authors in articles, in order to reduce the effects of co-authorship.
 

Multi-authored h-index

Uses fractional paper counts to account for shared authorship and then determines the multi-authored hm index.
 

Individual h-index (PoP Alternative)

First normalizes the number of citations for each paper by dividing the number of citations by the number of authors (hl,norm), then calculates the h-index.
 

Average annual increase in the individual h-index (hl, annual) (PoP)

Calculates the average annual increase in hI,norm. 

Minimizes impact of discipline-specific publication and citation patterns. 

Reduces the effect of career length on metrics.
 

i10Index (Google Scholar Citations)

i10-Index = the number of publications with at least 10 citations.