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A number of metrics exist to assess the number of citations for a given author. We would generally recommend using aggregated and normalised metrics for their individual papers, rather than the h-index.
Detailed guidance on using citation metrics for the appraisal of individuals is available, including a walk-through on obtaining data from InCites MyOrganisation, which is synchronised with RPS.
- The h-index
The h-index measures the author's impact based on the citation rates of their outputs. The h-index changes over time as the author publishes more and as those publications are cited by others. While it is commonly encountered, it is potentially very misleading, and we do not recommend using it in most circumstances. The policy states that it should not be used to directly compare individuals, and the guidance documents include an in-depth look at the problems with the h-index.
If you do nonetheless wish to identify an h-index, note that it will vary depending on the source used. An h-index from Web of Science or Scopus will generally be lower than one obtained from Google Scholar.
- Normalised and aggregate metrics
Databases like Scopus or Web of Science make it easy to see the total outputs or total citations for an author, but these figures can be misleading - they do not put those achievements in context. Someone with a very productive early career will tend to have many more citations gathered over time than someone who has been very productive in recent years, for example.
The InCites tool offers normalised metrics, where citation rates are averaged to take account of the age and field of a paper, and these can be used to give a more nuanced view of someone's publications - for example, rather than simply saying they have a large number of citations, we can say that they have a high number of papers in the top 10% of their field, or that their papers are on average twice as highly cited.
Detailed guidance on using citation metrics for the appraisal of individuals is available, including a walk-through on obtaining data from InCites MyOrganisation, which is synchronised with RPS.
- Identifying individual authors
If your target author has a common name or variant names, it is important to carefully check the list of outputs is accurate before generating an h-index. It is possible to use researcher identifiers (ORCID, Scopus ID, etc) to help with this.