Understanding Your S-index
This page explains what your S-index number actually represents, and how to make sense of it once you have one.
What Your Score Represents
Your S-index is the sum of the Dataset Indices of every dataset in your profile. Each Dataset Index combines that dataset's FAIR score, citations, and mentions relative to others in its field. So your overall S-index grows both as you share more datasets and as those datasets accumulate more impact over time.
Because of this, two researchers can land on the same S-index for very different reasons. The total tells you the scale of your data-sharing impact, but not the shape of it. For that, you can look at other metrics like total number of datasets, total number of citations, etc. provided on your profile.
How Well are You Doing?
A raw S-index on its own is hard to place by itself. Is your S-index "good"?
To answer that, you can expand the "S-index Interpretation" section on your profile and see how well you are doing against the millions of S-indices we auto-computed for the validation of the S-index (see Validation section). This is intentionally only visible to you when you are logged in. Anyone else visiting your profile will not see it.
For a general sense of scale, here's how S-index scores are distributed across our auto-computed values:
| Percentile | S-index | What this means |
|---|---|---|
| 50th (median) | 1.2 | Half of researchers score below this |
| 75th | 2.5 | Top 25% of researchers |
| 90th | 6.3 | Top 10% of researchers |
| 95th | 11.8 | Top 5% of researchers |
| 99th | 48.6 | Top 1% of researchers |