As part of the initiative by the Office of Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research & Innovation), some information on citations and h-index has been compiled for your reference.
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Introduction
Citations is one of the publication metrics/indicators to measure the significance or impact of publications. It can literally be translated to the reference point of research. However, citations also is limited to express the overall achievement of an author or institution. This is where h-index comes in. According to Wikipedia, The definition of h-index is that a scholar with an index of h has published h papers each of which has been cited in other papers at least h times.
Some example:
If an author has 1 publication with 1 citations. The h-index is 1.
If an author has 1 publication with 200 citations. The h-index is 1.
If an author has 1 publication with 2 citations and another 1 publication with 2 citations, the h-index is 2.
If an author has 1 publication with 200 citations and another 1 publication with 2 citations, the h-index is 2.
Please take note that if you have a h-index of 2, meaning, you have at least 2 papers with at least 2 citations each. So, to be able to have high h-index, you will need to make sure different papers received as many citations as possible. Even if a publication get cited 200 times but the rest of the papers have zero citations will result in h-index 1 (Example 2).
With that, the lowest achievable target is one citation (cumulative) which automatically translated to h-index 1.
Guidelines
There are a number of indexing services which keep track of citations. Example: Scopus, Web of Science (WOS), Google Scholar, ResearchGate, etc.
Citations information in Scopus and WOS are considered reliable since they only indexed journals of certain standard. Whereas for Google Scholar and ResearchGate, virtually any publications are indexed as long as they are available online.
Citations in Scopus and WOS are important because the information will be used for analysis, world ranking, university performance, etc. Where Google Scholar and ResearchGate are more of visibility and branding.
It is advisable to have these accounts:
Scopus ID (or Scopus author profile) will be automatically created as soon as we have a publication in Scopus. Based on the field of expertise, additional paper published in the future will be assigned to that specific profile/ID. There is, however, a possibility, that some publications in Scopus authored by us did not linked to our Scopus ID (partly due to the missing full author name in the publication and the different field of research we are involved with). Which is why it is important for the author to scrutinize their publications in Scopus and if they are not linked to the profile or if we have multiple profiles, we can request profile merging in Scopus (by email scopusauthorfeedback@elsevier.com or if you have any problem, email to teonghan@utm.my)
There is no automated ID creation in WOS which makes it quite difficult to track the citations. We can create an ID called Researcher ID (http://www.researcherid.com/) to help us keep track of our publication in WOS. However, the whole process is manually (i.e.: we will need to add our publications manually to our Researcher ID). With that, we can then track our citations.
Google Scholar and ResearchGate. These are alternative indexing services and are very useful for visibility purpose. They can be created at their respective website and papers can added either automatically or manually. Both provide some kind of citation metric. It is strongly recommended to have these account as well, especially for researchers who have yet to have Scopus or WOS indexed publications.
Please note that some accounts (particularly Researcher ID and Google Scholar) can be make private and this is not recommended. The account/profile should be made publically available, to make sure they are searchable, which can be translated to more reference and more citations.
Few strategies to improve citations
Although self-citation is not encouraged, it is ethically fine for us to cite our own work. Hence, we can start off with citing our own work.
We can also utilize our friends, students, supervisors, etc. to cite our work. This can be part of the collaboration efforts among our network for mutual benefits.
Since the Research Entities Membership Policy was enforced, all UTM academic staffs are required to be part of Research Group and/or CoE. This can also be part of the strategies to improve citation by working together.
Personal website as well as alternative academics profile (Google Scholar and ResearchGate) are a great way to promote citations as well.
For those who have yet to have publication in Scopus, we can start with UTM’s Jurnal Teknologi (either normal issue or special issue).
To search for journal indexed in Scopus, visit www.scopus.com, click Browse Source (above the search button). We can search look for the journals that are indexed by Scopus. Please pay attention to the indexing period. For example: Advanced Materials Research. This title is no longer indexed by Scopus since 2015. Same case for, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences.
To search for journal indexed by WOS, we can visit http://admin-apps.webofknowledge.com/JCR/JCR?SID. JCR is a short for Journal Citations Reports and it is compiled yearly by Thomson Reuters. JCR will rank the indexed journal in terms of Impact Factor and Quartile according to field. Here, we can get such information for a particular journal to assist us in deciding which journal for submission and so on.