Google Scholar

Search Scholar

Metrics

Google Scholar Metrics

Google Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics summarize recent citations to many publications, to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research.

To get started, you can browse the top 100 publications in several languages, ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. To see which articles in a publication were cited the most and who cited them, click on its h-index number to view the articles as well as the citations underlying the metrics.

You can also explore publications in research areas of your interest. To browse publications in a broad area of research, select one of the areas in the left column. For example: Engineering & Computer Science or Health & Medical Sciences.

To explore specific research areas, select one of the broad areas, click on the "Subcategories" link and then select one of the options. For example: Databases & Information Systems or Development Economics.

Browsing by research area is, as yet, available only for English publications. You can, of course, search for specific publications in all languages by words in their titles.

Scholar Metrics are currently based on our index as it was in July 2023.

Available Metrics

The h-index of a publication is the largest number h such that at least h articles in that publication were cited at least h times each. For example, a publication with five articles cited by, respectively, 17, 9, 6, 3, and 2, has the h-index of 3.

The h-core of a publication is a set of top cited h articles from the publication. These are the articles that the h-index is based on. For example, the publication above has the h-core with three articles, those cited by 17, 9, and 6.

The h-median of a publication is the median of the citation counts in its h-core. For example, the h-median of the publication above is 9. The h-median is a measure of the distribution of citations to the articles in the h-core.

Finally, the h5-index, h5-core, and h5-median of a publication are, respectively, the h-index, h-core, and h-median of only those of its articles that were published in the last five complete calendar years.

We display the h5-index and the h5-median for each included publication. We also display an entire h5-core of its articles, along with their citation counts, so that you can see which articles contribute to the h5-index. And there's more! Click on the citation count for any article in the h5-core to see who cited it.

Coverage of Publications

Scholar Metrics currently cover articles published between 2018 and 2022, both inclusive. The metrics are based on citations from all articles that were indexed in Google Scholar in July 2023. This also includes citations from articles that are not themselves covered by Scholar Metrics.

Since Google Scholar indexes articles from a large number of websites, we can't always tell in which journal a particular article has been published. To avoid misidentification of publications, we have included only the following items:

  • journal articles from websites that follow our inclusion guidelines;
  • selected conference articles in Engineering and Computer Science.

Furthermore, we have specifically excluded the following items:

  • court opinions, patents, books, and dissertations;
  • publications with fewer than 100 articles published between 2018 and 2022;
  • publications that received no citations to articles published between 2018 and 2022.

Overall, Scholar Metrics cover a substantial fraction of scholarly articles published in the last five years. However, they don't currently cover a large number of articles from smaller publications.

Inclusion and Corrections

If you can't find the journal you're looking for, try searching by its abbreviated title or alternate title. There're sometimes several ways to refer to the same publication. (Fun fact: we've seen 959 ways to refer to PNAS.)

If you're wondering why your journal is not included, or why it has fewer citations than it surely deserves, that is often a matter of configuring your website for indexing in Google Scholar. Please refer to the inclusion manual. Also, keep in mind that Scholar Metrics only include publications with at least a hundred articles in the last five years.