Impact factor measure for many journals is available using the Journal Citation Reports. As you investigate a particular journal, it is good to also look at the summary information for your discipline or field of study.  As a general rule, these journal measures are not comparable across disciplines.

In addition to this service, there are studies which have used the H-index concept and applied it to journals.  To see if there is a study such as this for your file

Impact measures at the article level vary over time and are not absolute. They include:

• Article “usage” downloads (data, when available, is from the journal publisher though if you have also deposited an article in the ScholarsArchive@OSU, statistics for views and downloads are available and can be considered in addition to any download provided by the publisher.)
• Citing of your article by others 
  • Web of Science “Cited Reference Searching”
  • Google Scholar
  • Scopus numbers (not supported by OSUL)
  • Inclusion in Mendelay
• Social media has encouraged a broader understanding of article level metrics, including (see http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/alm-info/ for a more complete list).
  
  • media and blog coverage
  • social bookmarking
  • discussion activity and ratings.

Your h-index is a threshold measure which will change over time.  It is an attempt to measure the productivity (number of publications) and impact of those publications as measured by how many times they have each been cited.  A scholar with an h-index of 10 has published 10 papers each of which has been cited in at least 10 other papers. (excluding self-citation). 

Computing an H-index value for your publications will vary by the tool(s) you choose.

• The Web of Science provides an h-factor based on the set of journals it indexes.
• Scopus also provides a figure based on Elsevier publications (but there is no institutional license to this product --you can try it out using their author preview)
• And, Harzing's Publish or Perish is an application that can be downloaded to your desktop) and provides a figure based on Google Scholar identified citations.

The second order h(sub2) index may be useful in ranking researchers/institutions.  It defines a index of X  for an author or collection of authors (an institution) as that number of publications they have written which have been cited in at least X articles each of which has also been cited in at least X articles.  

As with any citation-based metric, the h-index and the h(sub2) index lose some validity when applied across disciplines because rates of citation vary across disciplines. 

Oregon State University’s digital repository for research, scholarship, and historical records. OSU Libraries is responsible for collecting, maintaining, preserving, and providing access to the items in ScholarsArchive@OSU