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Evaluating scholarly publications

This guide introduces essential tools and indicators for evaluating research.

Citation data

The impact of research groups and researchers is evaluated by publication frequency, citations, academic networks and quality of publication channels. Indicators are h-index and g-index.

If you want to, for example, compare the citation reports and h-indexes for a certain university department, you need to decide beforehand how the data is searched:

  • Will you search only in Web of Science? What about Scopus and Google Scholar?
  • Will the search include all publication years or, for example, just the last five years?
  • Will your search include all publication types or only, for example, articles, review articles and proceeding papers?
  • Will you include self-citations?

The h-index

The Hirsch-index was developed by Professor Jorge E. Hirsch in 2005. The index measures researcher’s publication effectiveness and the significance of the publications. The higher the h-index is, the greater the number of the cited publications. 

The h-index is calculated as follows:
Researcher's h-index is h, if h of their publications (Np) have at least h citations each and rest of the publications (Np-h) have less than h citations each.

 

  • The advantage is stability because a few publications that have been cited many times do not greatly affect the index value. Publications that have not been cited at all or only a few times do not affect the index value at all.
  • The h-index varies in different fields, which means that researchers' h-indexes of different fields are not usually comparable.
  • The h-index is usually higher for researchers with a long career than for young researchers at the start of their careers.
  • Can also be used when evaluating journals.

The h-index in citation databases

Creating a citation report and researcher's h-index

Log in to your university's Finna (University of Vaasa, Novia) with your HAKA credentials and open the database Web of Science.

  1. Write the person's last name and the first letter of the first name in the search field and choose Author from the drop-down menu on the left.
  2. Choose the refining options you want on the left, for example, publication year, document type, affiliation.
  3. For a report on the publications left on the list after refining it, click Citation Report on the right.
  4. The h-index is in the report in addition to other data about the citations. You can save the report as Excel by choosing Export Full Report.
  • If there are still articles written by wrong authors in the results after refining them, you can select the publications you want one by one and then click Add to Marked List.
  • You will find your own list by clicking Marked List on the left. Again, click Citation Report for a report on the chosen publications.

Searching in Web of Science

It is always good to pay attention to the first letter of the first name, affiliation information and possible ambiguous disciplines. Problems can also be caused by Asian names, Scandic letters, multipart names, special characters and researchers who have changed their last name.

It can be hard to find and recognize ALL publications of a certain researcher.

  • Do multiple searches and refine the search results in different ways (e.g. research area, country, affiliation). The marked list feature is convenient because it enables you to save the articles you find with the searches.
  • You can save your searches in your own Web of Science profile or on your own computer (View your search history -> Export).

Instructions and guides

Researcher's h-index

Log in to University of Vaasa Finna with your HAKA credentials and open the database Scopus.

  1. Choose the tab Authors.
  2. Write the person's last name and the first letter of their first name in separate search fields.
  3. Choose the correct person from the list of authors.
  4. The h-index is in the author's information.
  • In Scopus, the h-indexes of researchers are available only from 1995.
  • Sometimes there may be more than one entry for the same author. In that case, you can ask Scopus to merge your author data. Choose the authors to be merged, then click Request to merge authors and follow the instructions.

Searching in Scopus

It is good to pay attention especially to possible errors in the merging of author information. Problems can also be caused by Asian names, Scandic letters, multipart names, special characters and researchers who have changed their last name.

Instructions and guides

Google Scholar Citations

Google Scholar Citations is an author profile service provided by Google, where researchers can create their own account (gmail account) and connect to it their publications found through Google Scholar. The profile shows the number of times the publications have been cited and an automatically calculated h-index. The profile can be public or private.

Note! Google Scholar does not cover all publications because it harvests only publications with abstracts available online. In addition, Google Scholar does not have access to the data in, for example, library databases and all university repositories. At the moment, publications that are not included in Google’s search results, cannot be added separately to the Google Scholar Citations profile.

Researcher's h-index

You can search for researchers in Google Scholar or sign in to your own Google Scholar Citations account.

  1. Write the person's name in the search field. If the researcher has a public profile, it will be listed in the search results.
  2. Click the researcher's name.
  3. The h-index is in the researcher's information on the right.

Tools for analysing citation data

Publish or Perish (PoP) is a free software developed by Australian Anne-Wil Harzing, available for download on Harzing's website. The software can be used to analyse citation data from Google Scholar, PubMed and Crossref among others. Author and journal impact can be evaluated with various indexes (h-index, g-index etc.) in Publish or Perish.

Researcher’s h-index

  1. Choose the database you want to use as source.
  2. Write the author's name in the field Authors (either first name last name or the first letter of the first name last name).
  3. If necessary, narrow by publication year and then search.
  4. Omit from the list of results unwanted publications one by one.
  5. The h-index on the right automatically updates as you omit publications from the list.

Searching in Publish or Perish

It is good to pay attention to if you use the first name or the first letter of the first name. Errors in publication and author information are possible. Problems can also be caused by Asian names, Scandic letters, multipart names, special characters and researchers who have changed their last name.

SciVal is Elsevier's research analysis and visualisation tool that uses the publication data in Scopus. University of Vaasa has access to SciVal, which is available via Finna online or remotely.

Publications can be evaluated at the level of an organisation, country, continent or research topic available already in the tool. You can also create targets to be analysed, in other words entities, by adding individual researchers and sorting them into research groups or units. Sets of selected publications can also be analysed.

In the Explore module, you can analyse various indicators, research topics and collaborative organisations. In the Compare module, research activities of selected entities or, for example, universities can be benchmarked. The data found in SciVal can be compiled into analysis reports containing various diagrams and figures, which can be edited under Reporting.

You can find instructions for using SciVal in their own LibGuide.

Correcting publication information

Citation databases may have different versions of a university's name, so it is possible that publications will be ignored or interpreted as publications of another organisation. Therefore, it is important that the official name of your university is correct in the information of the article you have published! The name of the research unit, centre or programme is not enough to indicate that it is your university's publication.

If you discover errors or something missing in your publication's information or that not all of your publications are registered under your profile, you should always ask the citation database to correct them.

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