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Web of Science Core Collection: The Citation Report & The h-index

Web of Science Core Collection is a painstakingly selected, actively curated database of the journals that researchers themselves have judged to be the most important and useful in their fields.

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Author, Institution and Field Performance

The Citation Report provides aggregate citation statistics for a set of search results. These statistics can be created for a specific author, institution or a unique record or a set of results.  It provides citation performance, broken down by year and can tabulate the data for:

  • The total number of results found (Results Found field);

  • The total number of times all records have been cited (Sum of Times Cited field);

  • The total number of citations to all results found in the results set minus any citation from articles in the set (Sum of Times Cited without Self-Citations field);

  • The total number of citations to any of the items in the set of search results (Citing Articles field);

  • The citing articles minus any article that appears in the set of search results (Citing Articles without Self-citations field);

  • The average number of times a record has been cited (Average Citations per Item field);

  • The total number of times a record has been cited for all years in the results set (Total column); and

  • The h-index count that is based on the list of publications ranked in descending order by the Times Cited count.

The h-index

The h-index is indicated by an orange horizontal line going through the Year / Total Year columns. The number of items above this line, which is "h" have at least "h" citations. For example, an h-index of 20 means there are 20 items that have 20 citations or more. This metric is useful because it discounts the disproportionate weight of highly cited papers or papers that have not yet been cited.

Calculating the h-index Value - The h-index factor is based on the depth of years of your product subscription and your selected timespan. Items that do not appear on the Results page will not be factored into the calculation. If your subscription depth is 10 years, then the h-index value is based on this depth even though a particular author may have published articles more than 10 years ago. Moreover, the calculation only includes items in your product - books and articles in non-covered journals are not included.

1. The h-index was developed by J.E. Hirsch and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (46): 16569-16572 November 15 2005.

Citation Reports