Speaker 1: Meet Bob. Bob is a STEM academic who is going for a promotion and wants to know how his research compares to other people in his field. Bob knows his papers get referenced by other researchers and the head of his department has mentioned measuring his research impact using traditional metrics. Now, Bob's not really sure what that means or where the best places to find this data. In this video, we'll introduce you and Bob to various tools that can be used as evidence of impact, including traditional citation counts, h-indexes, and

Speaker 2: where to find information about your papers. A citation count indicates how many published works have referenced your material. When you publish a paper referencing someone else's work, you add to their citation count. When someone comes along and says your paper's brilliant and uses it as a reference in their paper, that adds to your citation count. On its own, your citation count doesn't indicate how consistently you are cited. For that, you'll need to know your h-index. The h-index roughly calculates the intersection where the number of papers and the number of times you've been cited match. And here's the line that matches your h-index. So far in your career, you've written five papers and we'll put them in order from most cited to least cited. Let's say your most cited paper has been referenced 10 times. Your h-index number is a measure of where those two numbers meet on this line. So far, you have one paper that has been cited at least once, and so your h-index number is one. Your next most popular paper has been cited five times. It meets the line here, and so now your h-index is two. Your third paper only gets two citations, and because it hasn't reached this point yet, your h-index number remains at two. Your h-index is a measure of where you are in time. If after you check your h-index, another researcher cites your third paper, it will boost your whole h-index to a happy little three. For your h-index to be 18, you need to have published at least 18 papers which have

Speaker 1: been cited at least 18 times each. So where do you and Bob actually go to find these magical numbers, your citation count and h-index? They can be found in major databases like Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. You should be aware, though, that different databases will give you different numbers because they use different sources for their information. Because Bob is in STEM, he can be confident using Scopus and Web of Science, but his colleague, Betty, who's in the humanities, will probably get better numbers in Google Scholar, which is more likely to look at things like book chapters. Also, don't try to compare citation counts or h-numbers across disciplines.