Personal Impact Factor and H-Index Calculations: Home

A guide explaining the process for calculating your personal impact factor and for more guidance on impact factor in general.

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 and/or find their H-index can use the Scopus database to do so. Scopus is the standard at Mount Sinai for calculating these values. Other citation databases, such as Web of Science and Google Scholar, may provide different H-index values and 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 2021 to articles published in Journal X in 2020 and 2019
Total number of articles published in Journal X in 2020 and 2019

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 2021 to articles you published in 2020 and 2019
Total number of articles you published in 2020 and 2019

H-index

H-index = The number of papers (N) on a list of publications ranked in descending order by the times cited that have N or more citations.

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. Full citation: Hirsch JE. An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2005 Nov 15;102(46):16569-72.

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 network ID 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 and/or click "Show exact matches only." 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. You can also see your H-Index on this screen.

Scopus author search results with author and h-index highlighted

4. You will then see an Author Details page. To be able to sort by year, you must click on "View them in search results format" under the total documents box.

5. From the document results screen, you will refine your results by Year (choose 2018 and 2019 to calculate your 2020 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 three dots on the bar under Analyze Search Results and click View Citation Overview. The overview will give you the number of 2018 and 2019 publications. In this case, the number is 6.

Scopus document results with All and View citation overview highlighted

7. Take a look at the table at the bottom of the page. Find the 2020 column. The total number of citations for the 2018 and 2019 publications in 2020 is 58.

Scopus table of citations per year with 2020 column highlighted

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

Individual Impact Factor =

Cites in 2020 to articles you published in 2019 and 2018
Total number of articles you published in 2019 and 2018

Therefore, the personal impact factor in this example is 58 / 6 = 9.67.

Finding Your H-index

For a more detailed look at your H-index, you can view an h-graph by clicking on the link on your Author Details page. This will bring you to a page containing not just a graph, but a way to analyze documents by date range, view co-authors and other document data, and see the total number of citations for all publications.

To view all your publications, follow steps 1-4 in the second box, How to Calculate your Personal Impact Factor. Click on All and View Citation Overview to generate a list of results that will allow you to select individual documents.

Filtering for Citation Overview on Scopus with All and View Citation Overview buttons highlighted

Review the results carefully to make sure all the results listed are your publications. If there are a few errant results, select them individually and click Remove. This will also recalculate your H-index, which can be viewed at the top right of the screen. Note: If you do not see one or more of your publications, please contact the library for assistance.