Improving citations of published articles Balasubramanian Thiagarajan, Geetha Ramamoorthy Stanley Medical College Abstract: Higher educational institutions are ranked according to the number of citations received for their published work. More the citations better is the ranking. Every researcher hence looks to improve the citation score for their published work. This article attempts to review the various options a researcher has in improving citations. Studies reveal that better the visibility greater is the citation score. Introduction: Current academic evaluation scenario is based on active scholarly publications. Not long ago authors were graded according to the number of publications made by them. The focus then shifted to the number of articles published in journals with high impact factor 1 . The term impact factor and the formula to calculate it was first devised by Eugine Garfield. Impact factors of various scientific journals are being calculated using the formula from 1975. Impact factor calculation: In any given year, the impact factor of a journal is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years 2 . Even though impact factor was not fool proof it gave scientists a tool to access the quality of scientific literature. House of Commons in its 10 th Select committee on science and technology report acknowledges that more and more scientific literature is being published. The volume of published literature with the advent of computers and internet has increased by 100% when compared with that of pre computer era. Currently the output of published literature is increasing by 3% / year hence it is important to be all the more vigilant in weeding out chaff from kernel 3 . Calculation of impact factor could be a useful index in qualitative ranking scientific journals. Individual articles are being ranked according to the Impact factor of the publishing journal. This could be erroneous. So currently H index 4 is gradually replacing Impact factors and citation calculations.