Citations acknowledge the work of others and also indicate to readers where information in a paper came from.
Citations to one's publications are an indication of readership, interest and usefulness (impact) of your work to others.
Many databases now provide citation statistics and compile other metrics such as the h index. Two of the most notable such databases are Scopus and Web of Science which are listed in the Databases option on the Library website.
If you have a Google Scholar profile you will also be able to view an h index
A metric is a system or standard of measure. Citation Counts simply total the number of times your article, book, or other published research has been cited. Citation counts may vary across databases, such as Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, as each database indexes different journals.
Traditional metrics
The h-index can be regarded as a measure of the number of publications published (productivity) as well as how often they are cited (impact).
To calculate the h-index, only two pieces of information are required: the total number of papers published and the number of citations for each paper. Where these two numbers intersect is the h-index. Articles by an author will each have a different number of citations. Where the number of publications coincides with the number of citations, this is the h index. For instance, a researcher with 17 published articles has 12 that have been cited 12 times. The h index is thus 12.
Over time one expects publication output to increase and so should the h index.
The h index of an author will be different for different databases. This is because databases differ in the time period for which they calculate the h index, they include differnet collections of journals etc. For instance, Scopus only considers work from 1996 or later, while the Web of Science calculates an h-index using all the years that an institution has subscribed to.
J Hirsch who developed the h index proposes that after 20 years of research, an h-index of 20 is good, 40 is outstanding, and 60 is truly exceptional
Other metrics provided by some databases include a number of downloads, social media accesses and more.