H-Index: Google Scholar vs. Scopus
Hello and welcome to the Scholarly Communications Video Series from the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library. My name is Tom Harrod and I'm the Associate Director for Reference Instruction and Access at the Himmelfarb Library. Today we'll briefly be talking about finding H-index values in Google Scholar and Scopus. Let's get started! Here's a brief outline of what we'll be discussing. First what is the age index. Then we'll look at how to access H-index in both Google Scholar and Scopus. To begin with let's look at what is H-index. So H-index is a measure of both quantity and quality of a researcher's output. The idea is with one numerical value to represent both of those things. So the definition of an H-index is that a person's H-index is X when they have X number of articles with at least X or more citations. Let's take a look at an example. So let's say we have an author who has 10 Publications and here are the number of times each of those articles has been cited by other articles in descending order. So you'll see their most cited article has been cited 50 times, their second most 25, and so forth. In this example the author's H-index is 5 in that they have five articles that have been cited five or more times. You'll see these top five have five or more citations their sixth most cited article has fewer than six citations, so the H-index for this author would be five. Now that we've discussed what H-index is we're going to go to two different sources where you can find this value for authors. We're going to look at Google Scholar and Scopus. So let's go out and take a look so here we are on Google Scholar, and I'm going to look up an author in this case myself. Click on the profile up here and I'm going to look at my author profile on Google Scholar and you'll see on the right side of the screen it lists my H-index as 5. So if I look over here I can see one two three four five articles with five or more citations.
As they've listed my articles in descending order by number of citations uh so from Google Scholar it would indicate that my age index is 5. Next I want to look at a different source for H-index information and that is Scopus, so Scopus is an article database which we subscribe to and on our home page himmelfarb.gwu.edu you'll see it listed here. Click on that and I'm specifically going to do an author search. So I'm going to put in my last name and put in my first initial and go ahead and search. So I located my profile my author profile on Scopus and on the subsequent page if I scroll down I can see in the metrics overview it lists my H-index as six. So if I scroll down here I can sort by uh cited by highest and see one, two, three, four, five, six articles with six or more citations. So in this database my H-index is six. So the obvious question then is why is there a difference in my H- index between these two tools, and one it was six and the other it was five and the answer is that these two tools Google Scholar and scope is indexed different uh groups of journals. And so when they calculate my age index it's going to be based on the number of times my article has been cited by articles in the journals that they themselves have indexed. And so if they index a different set of journals it's quite possible that the H-index values are going to be different. So for instance one of my articles may have been cited by a journal or by cited by an article in a journal that was indexed by Google Scholar but not Scopus or vice versa. Another possibility is that my article itself may be in a journal that one of them indexed but the other didn't and so it's not uncommon for the values to be different. So unfortunately there's no one right answer as to what a person's age index is the important thing is that if you're comparing two different individuals to use the same methodology for both of them.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to finding H-index values in Google Scholar and Scopus. If you enjoyed this tutorial please visit our video library where you can also find the associated slides. If you have any questions about the material covered in this session or have questions specific to your own research don't hesitate to contact me at tph@gwu.edu. On behalf of the Himmelfarb Library's Scholarly Communications team thank you for listening.
As they've listed my articles in descending order by number of citations uh so from Google Scholar it would indicate that my age index is 5. Next I want to look at a different source for H-index information and that is Scopus, so Scopus is an article database which we subscribe to and on our home page himmelfarb.gwu.edu you'll see it listed here. Click on that and I'm specifically going to do an author search. So I'm going to put in my last name and put in my first initial and go ahead and search. So I located my profile my author profile on Scopus and on the subsequent page if I scroll down I can see in the metrics overview it lists my H-index as six. So if I scroll down here I can sort by uh cited by highest and see one, two, three, four, five, six articles with six or more citations. So in this database my H-index is six. So the obvious question then is why is there a difference in my H- index between these two tools, and one it was six and the other it was five and the answer is that these two tools Google Scholar and scope is indexed different uh groups of journals. And so when they calculate my age index it's going to be based on the number of times my article has been cited by articles in the journals that they themselves have indexed. And so if they index a different set of journals it's quite possible that the H-index values are going to be different. So for instance one of my articles may have been cited by a journal or by cited by an article in a journal that was indexed by Google Scholar but not Scopus or vice versa. Another possibility is that my article itself may be in a journal that one of them indexed but the other didn't and so it's not uncommon for the values to be different. So unfortunately there's no one right answer as to what a person's age index is the important thing is that if you're comparing two different individuals to use the same methodology for both of them.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to finding H-index values in Google Scholar and Scopus. If you enjoyed this tutorial please visit our video library where you can also find the associated slides. If you have any questions about the material covered in this session or have questions specific to your own research don't hesitate to contact me at tph@gwu.edu. On behalf of the Himmelfarb Library's Scholarly Communications team thank you for listening.