Calculate Your Academic Footprint: Get Started

Developing skills to determine an individual's scholarly impact is becoming essential to advancing an academic career (Hirsch, 2007).

This Calculate Your Academic Footprint guide:

• Overviews a process for creating a master publication list and master citation list
• Explains how these master lists are possible through data available in citation-tracking databases, and through the support of reference management software (such as RefWorks)
• Provides a process for keeping your citation counts current and relatively self-sustaining over time
• Describes how you can calculate a more robust and accurate h-index

¹ Hirsch, J. E. (2007). Does the h index have predictive power? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(49), 19193-19198. doi:10.1073/pnas.0707962104 

The process offered by this guide enables authors to proactively produce an accurate publication list (the 'master publication list') and to capture accurate citation counts for these publications (via a 'master citation list').

This flow chart captures the major steps of the process:

The process described by this flowchart begins with creating a list of your publications and then identifying the databases that contain them. From here you gather citations and set e-alerts in Web of Science, Scopus, and/ or Google Scholar. The next step involves using a reference management software like RefWorks to create current publication lists and compile current citation counts. Compiling your current citation counts will help you to calculate your h-index.