Clarivate has been rolling out new enhancements to the Web of Science (WoS) platform over the last year (new interface is available now!). Among them is a new tool for visualizing the overall publication and citation impact of an author, Author Impact Beamplots (AIBs). You can view a Beamplot from an author’s record in WoS. It will provide a view of an author’s entire publication set (articles and reviews only) that shows each paper’s citation percentile, the author’s average citation percentile per year, and the author’s career citation percentile median. The citation percentile is a normalized percentage of citations a paper receives controlling for subject category, document type, and year of publication. AIBs provide an alternative to single-point performance measures, such as the h-index, by contextualizing the volume and impact of an author’s work over time. Unlike the h-index, the citation percentile metric is normalized, allowing Beamplots to be used for comparisons between authors from different disciplines, and Beamplots do not disadvantage researchers who are early career or who take a break from research (although the most recent 2 years are suppressed to allow publications to accrue meaningful impact). Although AIBs are intended to encourage more nuanced interpretation of performance, they should be interpreted responsibly and in conjunction with other evaluative metrics.
