Personal Impact Factor and H-Index Calculations: Home
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
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
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.