Personal Impact Factor and h-Index Calculations: Home

A guide explaining the process for calculating your personal impact factor, giving guidance on impact factor in general, and providing information on finding your h-index.

Need Assistance Calculating Your Personal Impact Factor?

If you are affiliated with Mount Sinai and need help calculating your personal impact factor, please email us at refdesk@mssm.edu and we'll be happy to schedule an appointment with you to assist you with this task.

Definitions

Mount Sinai faculty who would like to calculate their personal impact factor can use the Scopus database to do so. Scopus is the standard at Mount Sinai for calculating this. Other citation databases, such as Web of Science and Google Scholar, may provide different citation data.

Journal Impact Factor

A journal impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is one of the evaluation tools provided by the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports® (JCR®) database. Mount Sinai uses an analogous formula to calculate personal impact factor.

Journal Impact Factor =

Cites in 2024 to articles published in Journal X in 2023 and 2022
Total number of articles published in Journal X in 2023 and 2022

Personal Impact Factor

An individual impact factor is a measure of the average frequency with which your recent articles have been cited in a particular year.

Individual Impact Factor =

Cites in 2024 to articles you published in 2023 and 2022
Total number of articles you published in 2023 and 2022

How to Calculate your Personal Impact Factor

1. Access the Scopus database. If you are off-campus, you will be promoted to sign in with your Mount Sinai email and password.

2. On the homepage, toggle from Document search to Author search. Fill out the Author Last Name and First Name fields. To get more exact results, you may want to fill out the Affiliation field. If you have an ORCID ID, you can also input that, but note that the other fields will not be searched. Click the Search button.

3. Click on the name that matches your affiliation.

scopus author results with name highlighted

4. You will then see an Author Details page. To be able to sort by year, you must click on the "search results format" link in the middle of the page under Documents.

scopus author details page with box around search results format link

5. From the document results screen, you will refine your results by Year (choose 2022 and 2023 to calculate your 2024 number) and Document Type (this is done to your advantage in order to exclude publications such as abstracts and editorials that are not usually cited). Then click "Limit to."

Scopus limiting results to certain years and publication types

6. Making sure all documents are selected, click on the "Citation overview" link. The overview will give you the number of 2022 and 2023 publications. In this case, the number is 17.

7. Take a look at the graph under the citation overview. Find the 2024 column. The total number of citations for the 2022 and 2023 publications in 2024 is 157.

Scopus graph of citations per year with 2024 numbers highlighted

This number is the numerator you will plug in to the individual impact factor equation.

Individual Impact Factor =

Cites in 2024 to articles you published in 2022 and 2023
Total number of articles you published in 2022 and 2023

Therefore, the personal impact factor in this example is 157 / 17 = 9.24.