Author metrics are used to track how often an author's works are cited and can demonstrate the reach and impact of a researcher's work. Author metrics can be used in funding applications, academic promotions and performance reviews. Author metrics are also used to discover key researchers in a field, track the work of colleagues and identify potential collaborators.

One of the biggest challenges to tracking and analysing an author's impact is having a correct, complete publication list for that author. At GCU we recommend using ORCID as a persistent author identifier and using this identifier whenever you publish.

There are two main citation-based author metrics:

• Citation count, or sum of times cited, is a simple measure of the number of citations a researcher has received for all their published outputs.
• The author h-index, proposed by Hirsch in 2005, measures a researcher’s impact based on the number of citations of their work:
  • h-index = number of papers (h) with a citation number ≥ h
  • Example: If an author has an h-index of 12 it means that out of the total number of published outputs by that author, 12 of those outputs have been cited at least 12 times.

These metrics can be found on Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar. The values will likely vary across these sources, based on the content indexed by each of these databases.