Q: What is Citation Report?
A: Citation Report assembles several important statistics about a set of results in an easy to view and easy to understand format. Citation report includes graphical displays of the number of papers and citations in each year, and summary data on the average citations per paper. For each paper in the analysis, it displays the total citations to date, the average number of citations per year, and the year-by-year citation count. Citation Report also presents the h-index for the results set. Any results list (up to 10,000 records) from a General Search can be used to create a Citation Report. Citation Report can show citation and publication trends for authors, journals, institutions, even papers on a subject.
Q: What is the h-index?
A: The h-index was developed by J.E. Hirsch and published in published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (46): 16569-16572 November 15 2005. It was reflects the productivity of authors based on their publication and citation records.
Q: How is the h-index calculated?
A: A researcher (or a set of papers) has an h-index of N if he/she has published N papers that have N or more citations each. The h-index is based on Times Cited data from Web of Science. It does not include citations to books, or to non-indexed resources.
Q: What are the advantages of the h-index?
A: h-index reflects not just the number of papers, or the number of citations; it has some indication of the number of well-cited papers. This provides an interesting complement to other performance metrics, since it is not influenced by a single highly-cited paper.
Q: What are the disadvantages of the h-index?
A: The h-index, like any other citation-based metric, is dependent on the subject area considered, as well on as the time since publication of important works. The h-index in the Citation Report reflects citations as of the most recent Web of Science weekly update, so it could vary upon subsequent analyses.
Q: What factors should be considered when looking at an h-index value?
A: As with all metrics based on citation, h-index will vary by such factors as: time, subject area, and the number of papers. Users should be careful to make appropriate comparisons such as comparing h-indexes within similar types of searches and/or similar subject areas.
Q: How do I find benchmark h-indexes?
A: Because the h-index can be determined for any population of articles, it is difficult to provide overall benchmarks for the value of the h-index. Very productive researchers in subject areas with high volumes of publication and citation can show h-index values over 100 at the peak of their scientific careers. Newer researchers in smaller subject areas can have h-indexes under 10. As with all metrics based on citation, h-index will vary by such factors as: time, subject area, and the number of papers. Users should be careful to make appropriate comparisons such as comparing h-indexes within similar types of searches and/or similar subject areas.
Q: How do I export Citation Report results to Excel?
A: You can save up to 500 results at a time to a coma delimited text file. This file can then be imported into Excel. If there are more than 500 results, export the results in blocks of 500 (eg: export 1-500, then 501-1000, etc.), open in Excel and append the results to a single Excel worksheet to allow viewing of all results in a single page.
Q: Is there a maximum number of records that can be used to create a Citation Report?
A: The maximum number of records that can be used to create a Citation Report is 10,000 records.
Q: Can a Citation Report be created for cited authors?
A: The Citation Report feature is not available for cited author/reference searches.
