Information for Faculty Authors

What most researchers want is a web-based tool that will:

• automatically index their articles
• attribute those articles correctly
• count citations to those articles
• calculate h-index and other metrics
• provide a permanent URL for others to view
• output the article list in a variety of formats.

Unfortunately we're not there yet. Some author tools are described on this page, but none of them is the silver bullet.

Publons is a free website where you can track your own research, including citation metrics, peer reviews, and more.  It is based on the Web of Science database. You must register to create an account (or use your Web of Science account if you already have one). In your Publons account you can

• create a list of articles written by you, indexed by Web of Science
• track performance measures like times cited and h-index
• list your previous institutions and other identifiers

Publish or Perish is freeware, created by an Australian academic to help her with her own research portfolio. You must download the software onto your computer. Publish or Perish searches Google Scholar and calculates a number of metrics that include:

• total papers
• times cited
• h-index
• g-index
• cites/paper.

Dr. Harzing's web site offers links to interesting articles about how to use and interpret these numbers.

ORCID, Open Researcher & Contributor ID, is a non-profit group trying to solve the author disambiguation problem. They hope to create a researcher registry that will use the linking power of the Internet to uniquely identify authors and contributors.

Much appreciation is due to Robin Sinn at Johns Hopkins University for most of the content of this guide.