Resources For Researchers

The Web of Science and Scopus databases both have features to enable you to identify individuals and institutions which research in your area. 

Start with a topic search and revise and refine your results so the articles you have are relevant to your own research topic. Both of these databases enable you to refine and analyze your results. You can see which institutions and authors have produced publications in your research area using the refine results options to the left of the screen. 

The quality of an individual researcher is calculated using a metric called the "h-index"-developed by physicist J.E. Hirsch.

Web of Science defines the h-index as "based on a list of publications ranked in descending order by the times cited. The value of h is equal to the number of papers (N) in the list that have N or more citations."

"A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np−h) papers have no more than h citations each." (Hirsch, 2005)

Scopus, Web of Science and Publish or Perish all calculate an author's h-index automatically. However, the calculation is based on the content held by the source doing the calculation - so an author's h-index will be different in Scopus, Web of Science or Publish or Perish (which uses Google Scholar).

The newer g-index was developed to give more weight to highly cited articles, while the Contemporary h-index gives weight to recently-published articles.