Find your h-index and article citations
Due to differences in database coverage, your citations and h-index will vary between databases. Database coverage will affect where you go to get citation and h-index statistics. Note, this page is for articles - see here for citations for other publication/output types.
Recommendations:
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- Check application requirements (for example, is source specified there?)
- If your field is relatively well-covered by Web of Science (WoS), you can use WoS (as a general rule, article-based subjects with most publishing in English tend to be ok, for example natural sciences, medicine, psychology, some social sciences). Citations and your h-index will be lower than in Google Scholar (as you can see by the example images below), but are from what some would consider to be more reliable sources - the international, editorially controlled peer-reviewed literature. See here for a description of coverage in Web of Science. If in doubt, you could consider providing both WoS and Google Scholar.
- If your field is not well covered by WoS, use statistics from Google Scholar. These are less reliable, as they can be inflated by e.g. academic blogs or predatory journals, but are an ok choice if WoS statistics would be a considerable under-representation.
- Citations are also available in databases such as Dimensions (freely available) or Scopus (no subscription at UiB). Dimensions has wider coverage than WoS, but is a newer service which reviewers may be less familiar with.
- Understand the issues around the h-index and citations (see Module 2), and consider comparing/supplementing with other statistics, such as usage statistics or alternative metrics, if appropriate. These are covered later in this module.
How to: The screenshots below show where to find statistics in your profile in Web of Science (top) and Google Scholar (below). Finding statistics in both is much easier if you have set up an ORCID, Web of Science or Google Scholar profile (see how in Module 1). If you do not already have a profile in WoS (and do not want to set one up), read how to search for yourself and issues to be aware of. Getting author statistics from Google Scholar is impractical without a profile, unless you only want individual article citations.
Screenshots taken from Web of Science (Clarivate) and Google Scholar (Google), all rights reserved.