New Citation Report provides H Index

The latest quarterly software update for Web of Science introduced a new feature called the Citation Report.  It captures citation activity and identifies citation trends.  The Citation Report enables you to instantly create formatted reports for any General Search (author, topic) of up to 10,000 records. A breakdown of the citation history for each record which can be exported for further analysis is available.

The report shows the number of articles published/year and the number of cites/year for a particular author or any general search.  It also calculates something called the h index.  This metric is useful because it discounts the disproportionate weight of highly cited papers or papers that have not yet been cited.  The h index was developed by J.E. Hirsch and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (46): 16569-16572 November 15 2005.

Follow these steps to use this tool:

a) Go to Web of Science http://isiknowledge.com/wos
b) Choose the General Search button
c) Do an Author or Topic search or another search that results in less than 10,000 records.

The Citation Report button appears on the right hand side of the screen, just below the Analyze Result button.

It is hoped that this measure might replace some of the importance placed on the impact factor of specific journals.  However, the usefulness of the measure is quite variable in different disciplines.