Interfolio Faculty Web Profiles: All about Scopus Metrics, Citations, and H-Indices
How Web Profiles Uses Data From Scopus
A faculty member's web profile page displays only the activity that has been added to their FAR account. The IDS system retrieves records from Scopus and suggests them to faculty for review. Faculty members must verify and accept these records before they are added to their FAR account and subsequently displayed on their web profile.
For premium users, Scopus data are also used to showcase citations and h-index metrics on faculty profile pages.
Understanding the H-Index Calculation in Web Profiles
The h-index is a metric used to measure both the productivity and impact of a researcher's work. It is calculated as follows:
- Rank your publications (listed in FAR) in descending order based on the number of times they have been cited.
- Identify the highest number (h) where the researcher has at least h papers that have each been cited at least h times.
- For example:
If a researcher has 10 papers, and 5 of them have been cited at least 5 times, but
the 6th paper has fewer than 6 citations, their h-index is 5.
- For example:
Key Points:
- A higher h-index indicates a stronger research impact.
- It balances quantity (number of papers) and quality (citations per paper).
FAQs
Why are metrics like Scopus citations not available for some of the Scholarly Contributions?
To display the Scopus citations to Web Profiles, the Scopus publication ID for the Scholarly Contributions is required. Web Profiles will attempt to find the Scopus publication ID based on matching rules for the following fields if the Scholarly Contributions in FAR are not imported through Interfolio Data Service (IDS) or the Scopus publication ID is missing in any Scholarly Contributions. At least one of these criteria must be met.
- DOI
- ISSN + Volume + Page
- Title + Year (80% match on title and subtitle)
- Author + Year + Page
- Host publication title + Journal title + Series title
- Journal ISSN
- Volume + Issue number
- Article number
- PMID (PubMed ID)
It is important to note that if a Scholarly Contribution is not indexed in Scopus, the Scopus citations will not be available understandably. However, with DOI matching, PlumX and Altmetrics can still be associated with the Scholarly Contribution, therefore, they can be displayed in Web Profiles.
Why does the Scopus data in Web Profiles not match the Scopus data in Scopus?
Web Profiles imports Scholarly Contributions from FAR, which may include a combination of Scopus data as well as data from other sources. Therefore, it is possible that there are more Scholarly Contribution records in Web Profiles than in Scopus. At the same time, it is also possible that there are fewer Scopus records in Web Profiles than in Scopus. Web Profiles does not directly import the Scopus data from Scopus as it will only updates the existing Scopus data from FAR.
Why are the h-index and Scopus citation counts under some profiles different from the numbers in Scopus?
Web Profiles only presents the Scholarly Contributions in FAR, which may be a different dataset from what is available in Scopus. Therefore, the calculation of the h-index and Scopus citation count is based on the Scopus data in FAR, which may lead to that discrepancy.
Why are the overall Scopus citation count and h-index lower than the total of the Scopus citations displayed in Web Profiles?
There are three cron jobs running in the backend (Match Scopus ID for publications job, Scopus citation job, h-index job) that update the Scopus citation count and h-index. These are scheduled for weekly updates. As a result, any delays in the calculations could sometimes lead to lower numbers.