Four things the free check cannot do
- 01
A weekly read of every record you watch
Researchers by ORCID iD or OpenAlex id, and groups of up to ten members, each read again every week with the same definitions as the free checks. - 02
One email that says what changed
New citations, mean FWCI and h-index then and now, papers new to the record, papers that entered the top 10% of their field, the biggest movers, and any paper newly flagged as retracted. - 03
The history of each record
Citations, mean FWCI, h-index and top 10% papers week by week from the day you start watching, the trend a single check cannot show. - 04
A report you can hand in
A dated document of a record or a lab, made to print or save as PDF, with every paper's figures, their DOIs and the method, so anyone can check any number.
Start free with one researcher
Free
One researcher, every week
$0
With a free account
- Watch one researcher
- The weekly email of what changed
- Every free check, as now
Pro
Your record, colleagues and lab
$190/year
17% less than paying monthly
- Watch up to 10 records: researchers or groups of up to 10
- One weekly email with what changed on each
- Each record's history, week by week
- A dated, sourced impact report of any record
Team
A research office or a department
$990/year
17% less than paying monthly
- Watch up to 100 records, researchers or groups
- Everything in Pro
- One account for the people you follow
Pro, answered
What does watching a record do?
Every week Frontier reads the record again: every paper's citations, its field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) and its citation percentile, and the record's mean and median FWCI, h-index and papers in the top 10% of their field. You get one email that says what changed on each record you watch: new citations, papers new to the record, papers that entered the top 10%, the papers that gained most, and any paper newly flagged as retracted.
The figures are kept week by week, so a Pro record shows how its FWCI and citations have moved since you started watching it.
Where do the figures come from?
From OpenAlex, the open index of scholarly works (CC0), read live each week. FWCI is OpenAlex's: a paper's citations divided by the average for papers of the same field, publication year and type, so 1.0 is the world average. The percentile and the top 10% and top 1% flags are OpenAlex's too, and the h-index and the means are computed from the papers counted on the record, as on the free researcher check.
A watched ORCID iD is read as the papers OpenAlex attributes to it. An author profile can hold someone else's paper, so every paper on a watched record has a Not mine switch, and the figures leave out what you switch off.
What is in the impact report?
A dated document of one record or group, made to print or save as PDF: its headline figures, how they have moved while you watched it, every counted paper with its FWCI, percentile, citations and DOI, and a short statement of the method and its sources, so a committee or an assessor can check any number.
Who is the Team plan for?
Research offices, departments and institutes that follow many people or groups: it watches up to 100 records, each a researcher or a group of up to 10, with the same weekly email, history and reports as Pro.
Can I cancel?
Yes, at any time, from your records page (Manage billing). Your records and their history stay in your account, and the free plan keeps reading the first researcher you watched.
Should these figures decide who is hired or promoted?
Not on their own. FWCI adjusts for field, year and document type, which makes it fairer than raw citation counts, but it does not see a person's role on a paper, their career length or the work that is not papers. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and the Leiden Manifesto ask that indicators support expert judgment, and the report says so beside the figures.