Closer to the individual

Article- and author-level metrics focus on the work or the person, not the journal.

  • Citation count — how often a specific article is cited.
  • h-index — you have an h-index of h if h of your papers each have at least h citations.
  • i10-index — how many of your papers have at least 10 citations (used by Google Scholar).
Worked example — reading an h-index
A researcher’s papers have 40, 18, 9, 6, 5, 3… citations. They have h = 5: five papers with at least 5 citations each (the sixth has only 3). The h-index balances productivity and citation — but it grows with career length and varies hugely between fields, so never compare across disciplines.

🔗 Learn more (free): Wikipedia — h-index (definition and limitations)

Try it
On a Google Scholar profile (yours or a well-known scholar’s), find the h-index and i10-index. Do they match what you would expect from the citation list?

Self-check

Why is it unfair to compare the h-index of an early-career researcher with that of a senior professor — or across different fields?

© FRELIP, released under CC BY 4.0. Adapted in part from openly-licensed UNESCO (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) and institutional research-support materials. Linked resources remain under their own licences. Curated by the FRELIP Open Courseware editorial team.

Última alteração: quinta-feira, 4 de junho de 2026 às 12:48