Physics GRE Discussion Forums

I may be totally wrong with my understanding and approach to this. But this is a downside I see about using citations for comparing different professors:

A professor at a top 10 school may get more citations per paper [ as compared to a professor from say rank 20~50 school] since there will be lot of others looking to collaborate with him. These others could be graduate students looking for doing Post doc with him or other professors looking for doing sabbatical at his place.

I am trying to compare professors in one school to other. Is citations per paper a good measure of judging how good a professor is? Especially since I am not attending open houses and I do not have any research experience in the field in which I want to do PhD [which means I cannot make head or tail out of the professor's papers], I was wondering how to compare two schools [besides ranking of course] and professors?

sidharthsp wrote:I may be totally wrong with my understanding and approach to this. But this is a downside I see about using citations for comparing different professors:

A professor at a top 10 school may get more citations per paper [ as compared to a professor from say rank 20~50 school] since there will be lot of others looking to collaborate with him. These others could be graduate students looking for doing Post doc with him or other professors looking for doing sabbatical at his place.

I am trying to compare professors in one school to other. Is citations per paper a good measure of judging how good a professor is? Especially since I am not attending open houses and I do not have any research experience in the field in which I want to do PhD [which means I cannot make head or tail out of the professor's papers], I was wondering how to compare two schools [besides ranking of course] and professors?

1. how many good publications (e.g. PRL, PR series, PLB...)
2. h-index
3. funding

Calculating this h-index is pretty complex. I tried with google scholar.

How to know about funding details about a professor. Asking a professor directly might be inappropriate?

http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm

That will calculate the h-index, g-index etc. for you using google scholar.

trinitron wrote:http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm

That will calculate the h-index, g-index etc. for you using google scholar.

Hey thanks! that software helped very much...

Thanks, trinitron, I found the software useful. And, thanks sidharth for bringing up the topic.