Google Scholar is a wonderful research resource. The free service covers a huge amount of the global scientific publishing enterprise, encompassing peer-reviewed articles, books, reports, conference papers, and preprints. It's easy to use and accessible to anyone.
It also compiles citation counts as a rough indicator of a researcher's influence. Of particular interest to academicians and university administrators is a scholar's h-index. An h-index of 10, for instance, means a person has 10 papers with at least 10 citations each. The higher the h-index, the more influential the researcher's work.
