Help for Astrometrics

Astrometrics is a tool to perform bibliometric searches. Astrometrics makes a query to NASA-ADS to gather all the information needed to evaluate of the bibliometric parameters.
Author The author name should be specified as the NASA-ADS:
Last, First M, one per line: Smith, A
The default search will find all articles starting with "Smith, A" (e.g. Smith, A. - Smith, Adam - Smith, A. C.). If more than one Smith, A. exists then try the "exact name search" with which a strict search is carried out: a search for "Smith, A." will find only publications from "Smith, A." and not from "Smith, Adam", nor from "Smith, A. C.". Multiple authors can be inserted one per line. There is not a maximum allowed number but if the search has to be carried out on a large number of authors we ask to split the full list in ~20 authors per search.
Search options
Years One has to specify the time interval during which the search is performed. First and last years must be typed in.
Bibliographic sources Default: refereed articles only.
As in NASA-ADS there is the possibility to run the search selecting all the bibliographic sources (including all non-refereed material) or limiting the search to refereed articles (based on NASA-ADS).
Debugging Default: None.
If selected it gives a handle on the calculations carried to compute the relevant bibliometric parameters. Selecting "First author" it shows all the publications considered (and in bold face the ones matching the first author request).
Buffering Default: active (but enabled, i.e. working). Astrometrics first tries in its buffer if the requested information is available before sending a query to NASA-ADS.
Exact Name Default: not active (but enabled, i.e. working) If activated Astrometrics starts a strict search on the given author name "Smith, A." will find only publications from "Smith, A." and not from "Smith, Adam", nor from "Smith, A. C.".
Best reviews If activated Astrometrics selects only specified journals: A&A, A&AS, ApJ, ApJS, Natur, Sci, A&ARv, ARA&A, Icar, JHEAP, MNRAS, PASA, PASJ, PASP, AN , AJ, SSRv, SolPhys, PhysRep, ExA, AcA , ApOpt, AJS, COGra, NatCo. See ADS Bibliographic Codes: Journal Abbreviations for a complete journals list.
ADS source Not to overload a single ADS site, we randomly pick up one of the ADS mirror.
General Index Common logarithm for all columns multiplication except columns Yr and IF. General index is calculated using best reviews.
Bibliometric parameters
N. articles Number of articles published in the time interval selected.
N. articles normalised (Norm. auth.) Number of articles published in the time time interval selected. Each article is weighted by the number of authors and the total number is given by the sum of all the weights.
N. First author Number of first author articles except for authors ordered list.
Citations Cumulative number of citations for all the selected articles.
Normalised citations (Norm. auth.) Number of citations normalised to the number of authors per article. This is done for each article separately and then these numbers are summed together.
Impact Factor Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
Each journal is characterised by a number, the Impact Factor (IF), testifying how much "difficult" is to publish on that journal. The IF depends also on the year and is computed based on the number of citations all the articles published in a given year get in the next year. We obtained from the web the IF of a number of journals (20, see list) starting from 1992 up to now. IF for years earlier than 1992 are taken equal to the 1992 value. For the current year the IF has not been worked out yet, so we take the one of the year before and update the table as soon as we get the new ones. The total IF number is just given by the sum of all the IF for each single article.
Normalised Impact Factor (Norm. auth.) Impact factor normalised to the number of authors per article. This is done for each article separately and then these numbers are summed together.
h-Index Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index
This is the index proposed by J. E. Hirsch http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0508025 It aims to provide a robust metric of a researcher's impact, combining quality with quantity. It is defined as the largest integer for which N articles collected more than N citations.
Normalised h-Index (Norm. auth.) It is the h-index normalised to the number of authors. The list of articles is first sorted according to the total citations normalised per authors and then the index is computed. At variance with the h-index the normalised h-index can be also a real number.
g-Index Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-index
This index has been proposed by L. Egghe (Theory and practice of the g-index, Scientometrics, Vol. 69, No 1 (2006), pp. 131-152). g index aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to highly-cited articles. It is defined as: given a set of articles ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received (together) at least g^2 citations.
Normalised g-Index (Norm. auth.) As for the normalised h-index, this is computed by sorting the article citation list normalised per author and then the g-index algorithm is run.
e-Index Look at The e-Index, Complementing the h-Index for Excess Citations
The e-Index is a a necessary h-Index complement, especially for evaluating highly cited scientists or for precisely comparing the scientific output of a group of scientists having an identical h-Index.
Normalised e-index (Norm. auth.) As for the normalised h-index, this is computed by sorting the article citation list normalised per author and then the e-index algorithm is run.