19 February 2011
Increasing your h-index by reclaiming misspelled citations
Tags: citations, h-index, web of sciencePosted in Tips
Here is a short contribution on how to correct misspelled citations in Web of Science. Citations have become the currency of science, which is used to reward scientists and scientific institutions. Small variations in citation scores can make millions of pounds difference in the financial outcomes of national Research Assessments . Therefore keeping your citation record updated is of critical importance.ISI Web of Science has the possibility of reclaiming citations which have been misspelled in the original manuscripts. To do this, go to ‘Cited Reference Search’ and type in your name and initials in the author field. You will get a list of articles with the number of citations. Importantly, the articles which do not have a record assigned to them (i.e. the ‘View Record’ link) have not been correctly assigned to your citation record. This may be because the year, volume number, or page is incorrectly referred.
Next thing to do is select the miscited articles and click ‘Finish Search’. You should now see a list of all the articles that have miscited your work. Open a new text document and copy/paste all these items into it. Now you will have to find for each article the IDS-number, which is shown when you click on the title. It will also be useful to find which reference number in the article actually cites your work.
After this is completed, you can start sending corrections to Thomson/ISI by clicking on the ‘Feedback’ link at the bottom of the page. Click ‘report a data/citation correction’ link. Annoyingly, now a form appears which has to be filled out partly. A guaranteed method is to work your way through the list by sending a request for every paper that has miscited your work; however it may be possible to send a form for each of your articles and then copy in the ‘Change requested’ field all the papers that miscite your article. Once you are done with this it should take up to two weeks for Web of Science to be updated. Note that you are only allowed to send 8 changes per day.
In addition to searching the miscitations for your own work, you may also want to search for the names of all first authors that have appeared on papers where you were not a leading author. In addition, it may be worthwile to search for variation of your name and initials.
Note that correcting miscitations is not tweaking, but merely reclaiming your credits. If you don’t want to go through the effort of correcting each and every one of them, it may be worth looking for those papers that are on the edge of being counted in your h-index, or those that contribute to your institutes research assessment score.
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