UTEP Library Research Guides: Measuring Academic Output: Measure by Author

What do author-level metrics do?

Author level metrics provide a measure of impact of one particular author. Most author level metrics incorporate citation counts of articles written.

ORCID

Benefits of an ORCID
Benefits of using ORCID

An open, non-profit, community-based effort to create and maintain a registry of unique research identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers
ORCID provides a standard unique author identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized
ORCID Registry aims to prevent authorship confusion
Some publishers will require an ORCID ID in the ScienCV platform, for linking researchers, their grants and their scientific output

Google Scholar Author Profile

Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name.
It's quick to set up and simple to maintain. You can add groups of related articles, not just one article at a time; and your citation metrics are computed and updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to your work on the web. You can choose to have your list of articles updated automatically or review the updates yourself, or to manually update your articles at any time.
On the Google Scholar page click on the "My Citations" icon on the top left. You DO need to have a Google Account to use My Citations. If you do not have one, you can easily set one up.

Example of a Google Scholar Citations Profile

Google Scholar does not index all scholarly articles; therefore, some articles citing the item under study may not be counted.
Author names can be tricky to search and the results can vary greatly depending on how the name is entered; we recommend searching only the author's last name and combining that with the main title in quotations.
Google Scholar includes citations from an array of sources in its cited by calculation, including PowerPoints and Word documents, and gives everything an equal rank.
Variants in how the item is cited can result in more than one entry for the item under study.
The term "citation" in brackets [CITATION] at the beginning of an entry, indicates that the full text of the item is not accessible through Google Scholar.

The h-index is a measure of an author's research impact. It is a combined measure of both the productivity (number of papers) and the impact of a researcher’s publications (citations). It provides a mechanism for the work of individual researchers to be compared with others in the same discipline.

Example: If a researcher has an h-index of 4, this means that the researcher has four papers that have each been cited four times or more.

Example: If a researcher has an h-index of 15, the researcher has fifteen papers that have each been cited fifteen times or more.

is most appropriate for researchers who are established and have published extensively.
it measures “durable” performance, not only single peaks, and avoids skewing by one highly cited paper.
any document type can be included including conference papers and book chapters

not a good indicator for early career researchers, as both their publication output and citation rates will be relatively low
highly dependent on the length of a researcher’s career, meaning only researchers with similar years of service can be compared fairly.
provides no indication of peaks and dips in publication performance.
is a less appropriate measure of academic achievement for researchers in the humanities and social sciences

A Survey of Author-Identifier Methods

Author identifiers, such as ORCIDs, give you a way to reliably and unambiguously connect your names(s) with your work throughout your career, including your papers, data, biographical information, etc. This can be helpful in a number of ways:

Provides a means to distinguish between you and other authors with identical or similar names.
Links together all of your works even if you have used different names over the course of your career.
Makes it easy for others (grant funders, other researchers etc.) to find your research output.
Ensures that your work is clearly attributed to you.

Product	Type	Registration	Scope/Limitations
Open Identifiers
ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier)	From ISNI International Agency; ISO (International Organization for Standardization) certified	ISNI gets data from many sources. Search existing IDs on the search page. Apply for an ISNI.	Very broad in scope. Includes IDs for authors, researchers, artists, performers, publishers and more. Used primarily for identifying organizations, authors of books, and researchers for a limited number of EU countries
Proprietary Identifiers
Researcher ID	Proprietary - From Thomson Reuters	Fill out the web form, then you'll get an email registration to obtain an ID.	Integrated with Web of Science and will link your publications in that database to your ID. Can manually add publications not included in Web of Science or import them from another source. Thompson Reuters supports ORCID and recommends that authors obtain an ORCID in addition to a Researcher ID. See their page on Researcher ID & ORCID Integration.
Scopus Author Identifier	From Elsevier	Identifier automatically assigned to all authors indexed in Scopus	Articles indexed in Scopus only.
Google Scholar Citations	From Google	From Google Scholar click My Citations and login to your Google account. After entering information into your profile Google will retrieve articles likely to be authored by you. Articles can then be added to your profile (in groups and/or individually.)	Items indexed by Google Scholar only.
Repository Identifier
arXiv Author IDs	From arXiv	Used to accurately identify contributors to arXiv, an electronic archive of research articles in the sciences maintained by the Cornell University Library. arXiv authors opt-in to create an author ID on the create an author identifier page.	Currently links to articles indexed in arXiv only. To see what services arXiv offers based on their identifiers see their author identifiers help page.