How use Citation Metrics on Google Scholar?

Citation Metrics on Google Scholar provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics summarize recent citations to many publications, to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research.

To use Scholar Metrics, go to the Metrics home page. You see 2 tables: Top publications and Public access mandates.

Top publications - Top cited publications over the last five years. Publications are ranked by the h5-index, which is the highest number of articles in the last 5 years that have each received at least the same number of citations.

For example, the journal "Nature" has an h5-index of 488. It means that 488 articles published in the last 5 years have been cited at least 488 times each.

Here are 10 publications with highest h5-indexes as of April 1, 2025:

Top publications - Top cited publications over the last five years

    Publication                                 h5-index  h5-median
1.  Nature                                      488       745
2.  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision ...  440       689
3.  The New England Journal of Medicine         434       897
4.  Science                                     409       633
5.  Nature Communications                       375       492
6.  The Lancet                                  368       678
7.  Neural Information Processing Systems       337       614
8.  Advanced Materials                          327       420
9.  Cell                                        320       482
10. International Conference on Learning ...    304       584

Public access mandates - Summary statistics for funding agencies. It provides a list of all founding publishers with percentages of their article contents being available to Google Scholar.

Here are 10 examples of funding agencies and their availabilities: as of April 1, 2025:

Public access mandates - Summary statistics for funding agencies

    Founder                                         2021 2022 2023 Overall
1.  National Natural Science Foundation of China    51%  52%  48%  50%
2.  US National Institutes of Health                75%  74%  74%  75%
3.  European Commission                             90%  90%  90%  88%
4.  US National Science Foundation                  72%  73%  72%  63%
5.  German Research Foundation                      75%  76%  78%  58%
6.  Government of Spain                             84%  86%  87%  80%
7.  US Department of Energy                         77%  77%  76%  73%
8.  Natural Sciences and Engineering Research ...   56%  59%  61%  54%
9.  Department of Science & Technology, India       54%  51%  47%  56%
10. US Department of Defense                        54%  53%  53%  50%

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