Using Web of Science to measure your impact
The database Web of Science (available through the library website Database Finder) has an extensive suite of tools that quantify your citations and overall impact in your research field.
To use these tools, begin by searching for yourself in the Web of Science Author Search and identifying the record that contains your own work.
The impact summary shows impact metrics including your "h-index", explained below. The record summary shows basic biographical information: names, affiliations, and subjects. Following that is a list of your Documents with citation counts, and a "Beamplot" (explained below).
Web of Science Impact Summary
"The h-index value is based on a list of publications ranked in descending order by the Times Cited count. An index of h means that there are h papers that have each been cited at least h times. The h-index is based on the depth of years of your product subscription and your selected timespan. Source items that are not part of your subscription will not be factored into the calculation."
This section of the page also includes a Citation Report which you can view and export.
Web of Science Author Record summary
In the top left corner of the page will be your Author Record: a summary of your names, institutional affiliations. and research areas. This example record was generated by Web of Science but if you create an account in Web of Science you can claim your record and update or correct it.
Web of Science document list with number of citations
In the bottom section under the Documents tab, Web of Science displays a list of all your published articles, with the number of times cited for each. By default the display is set to "past ten years", not to show your entire publication list. Typically more recent publications will have fewer citations (or none) than older articles.
Web of Science Citation Beamplots
The Author Impact Beamplot graphically illustrates how the citation rate of your publications compare with other researchers. The purple dots represent your articles, plotted on a graph where the vertical axis is the year and the horizontal axis shows the percentile that your citation rate falls in compared to others.
