When demonstrating author productivity and impact the most common metric used is the H-Index.
In order to help ensure more accurate metrics for themselves, authors would be wise to sign up for and use stable author identifier numbers like an ORCiD to help validate which publications are theirs, identify themselves uniquely among others with similar names, help track their own papers if they have had name changes, and improve the findability of other types of their outputs such as blog posts, conference papers, and posters.
Additionally, social media impact can be measured through ImpactStory.
"MSU Scholars is Michigan State University’s instance of Academic Analytics’ public-facing version of their Research Discovery Suite. MSU Scholars highlights the visibility and research activity of MSU faculty and academic staff, identifying experts for local, state, national, and international research and business communities. MSU faculty and staff can login to the corresponding internal site, Faculty Insight, and search for grant funding opportunities as well as other subject experts with whom to collaborate. Faculty Insight contains a link to FAQs and a User Guide. For questions or comments please contact Kyle Sweitzer at kvs@msu.edu "
Author profiles and identification numbers are the best way to disambiguate you and your citations from an author with a similar name. These profiles are essential to calculating metrics like the H-Index and by signing up for and managing your authorial profiles you will ensure the accuracy of the citations attributed to you and the associated metric outputs.
First suggested in 2005 by Hirsch in his article Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National academy of Sciences, 102(46), 16569-16572.
The H-index is a metric representing the intersection of an author's productivity (publication count) and impact (citation count).The basic formula is that : h is the number of articles greater than h that have at least h citations. For example, an h-index of 5 means that there are 5 items that have 5 citations or more.
There are major caveats to using this metric:
Further Reading on the H-Index
It is usually inappropriate to compare researchers to each other using the H-index.
Any kind of comparisons will have the best results only if the researchers compared are:
And always be aware that there are systemic reasons why two researchers may not have similar scholarly output: funding, family needs, career path, research topic choice, as well as the broader issues and impacts of gender, racial, socio-economic, and class status.
There are three providers that calculate the H-index for authors (Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar). Each one will give a different number because each has different coverage , benefits, and limitations.
The key is to choose one source and be consistent because there is no one official H-index for a person.