Michael S. Rosenberg’s Laboratory

Computational Evolutionary Biology & Bioinformatics

E-mail: msr@asu.edu

Publication and Citation-based Impact

I have been collecting data on citations of my own work for a number of years and once wrote a guide to the concepts for biologists (rather than for those better versed in bibliometrics and scientometrics) (put on PeerJ Preprint Server, 2014-08-26). I have expanded the collection of metrics beyond those described in the paper and have now created a separate webpage for every metric, including a basic explanation, a worked example (in many cases), and a year-by-year history of that metric based on my own publication record.

The code for calculating all of these metrics can be found on Github.

Common Symbols and Definitions

• P — The total number of publications of an author. Unless otherwise specified, publications are in rank order from 1…P, with 1 having the most citations and P the fewest.
• Ci — The number of citations for the ith publication.
• Cx — The sum of citations for the top x publications, $$C^x=\sum\limits_{i=1}^{x}{C_i}$$.
• Ai — The number of authors of the ith publication.
• ai — The ordered position of the focal author among the full author list of the ith publication, it's value can range from 1 to Ai.
• Yi — The year of the ith publication.
• Y0 — The year of the author's first publication, $$Y_0=\min\left(Y_i\right)$$.
• academic age — The number of years since an author's first publication. If Y is the current year (or year of interest), the academic age of the author is $$Y-Y_0+1$$.