What most researchers want is a web-based tool that will:

• automatically index their articles
• attribute those articles correctly
• count citations to those articles
• calculate h-index and other metrics
• provide a permanent URL for others to view
• output the article list in a variety of formats.

Unfortunately we're not there yet. Some author tools are described on this page, but none of them is the silver bullet. If you find a tool you'd like to share with us, please contact Robin Sinn.

Google Scholar Citations lets you track citations to your articles in Google Scholar. You can also create an author page that will display your articles, link to citing articles, and calculate some metrics.

Publish or Perish is freeware, created by an Australian academic to help her with her own research portfolio. You must download the software onto your computer. Publish or Perish searches Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic to calculate a number of metrics that include:

• total papers
• times cited
• h-index
• cites/paper.

Dr. Harzing's web site offers links to interesting articles about how to use and interpret these numbers. In 2017 she addressed concerns about Google Scholar's metrics.

ResearcherID was how Clarivate's Web of Science identified individual authors and pulled their publications and citations together. In Spring of 2019,  ResearcherID was transferred to Publons, a system initially built to support the peer review process.

If you had a Web of Science ResearcherID, it has now been transferred to Publons. They've created a FAQ to answer questions. A Publons profile will include

• a list of articles indexed by Web of Science
• metrics associated with those publications generated by the Web of Science Core Collection
• a list of reviews you performed for publishers associated with Publons

The metrics from ResearcherID are still there, they just aren't the main attraction now. 

Scopus attempts to disambiguate authors and assigns each author a unique identifiation number. Scopus allows you to:

• see your h-index based on your Scopus articles
• track citing articles
• pull together different versions of your name
• update details in your author profile.

You need to complete a web form if you need to correct your Scopus author profile. Your author page has a permanent URL that you can share, but the article citations can only be seen by people who have access to this subscription database.

Here's an example of how wildly different the numbers can be. The search is for "Sinn RN" as author.