what is a good h index for a researcher

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What is a Good H-index?

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You have finally overcome the exhausting process of a successful paper publication and are just thinking that it’s time to relax for a while. Maybe you are right to do so, but don’t take very long…you see, just like the research process itself, pursuing a career as an author of published works is also about expecting results. In other words, today there are tools that can tell you if your publication(s) is/are impacting the number of people you believed it would (or not). One of the most common tools researchers use is the H-index score.

Knowing how impactful your publications are among your audience is key to defining your individual performance as a researcher and author. This helps the scientific community compare professionals in the same research field (and career length). Although scoring intellectual activities is often an issue of debate, it also brings its own benefits:

• Inside the scientific community: A standardization of researchers’ performances can be useful for comparison between them, within their field of research. For example, H-index scores are commonly used in the recruitment processes for academic positions and taken into consideration when applying for academic or research grants. At the end of the day, the H-index is used as a sign of self-worth for scholars in almost every field of research.
• In an individual point of view: Knowing the impact of your work among the target audience is especially important in the academic world. With careful analysis and the right amount of reflection, the H-index can give you clues and ideas on how to design and implement future projects. If your paper is not being cited as much as you expected, try to find out what the problem might have been. For example, was the research content irrelevant for the audience? Was the selected journal wrong for your paper? Was the text poorly written? For the latter, consider Elsevier’s text editing and translation services in order to improve your chances of being cited by other authors and improving your H-index.

What is my H-index?

Basically, the H-index score is a standard scholarly metric in which the number of published papers, and the number of times their author is cited, is put into relation. The formula is based on the number of papers (H) that have been cited, and how often, compared to those that have not been cited (or cited as much). See the table below as a practical example:

In this case, the researcher scored an H-index of 6, since he has 6 publications that have been cited at least 6 times. The remaining articles, or those that have not yet reached 6 citations, are left aside.

A good H-index score depends not only on a prolific output but also on a large number of citations by other authors. It is important, therefore, that your research reaches a wide audience, preferably one to whom your topic is particularly interesting or relevant, in a clear, high-quality text. Young researchers and inexperienced scholars often look for articles that offer academic security by leaving no room for doubts or misinterpretations.

What is a good H-Index score journal?

Journals also have their own H-Index scores. Publishing in a high H-index journal maximizes your chances of being cited by other authors and, consequently, may improve your own personal H-index score. Some of the “giants” in the highest H-index scores are journals from top universities, like Oxford University, with the highest score being 146, according to Google Scholar.

Knowing the H-index score of journals of interest is useful when searching for the right one to publish your next paper. Even if you are just starting as an author, and you still don’t have your own H-index score, you may want to start in the right place to skyrocket your self-worth.

See below some of the most commonly used databases that help authors find their H-index values:

• Elsevier’s Scopus : Includes Citation Tracker, a feature that shows how often an author has been cited. To this day, it is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.
• Clarivate Analytics Web of Science : a digital platform that provides the H-index with its Citation Reports feature
• Google Scholar : a growing database that calculates H-index scores for those who have a profile.

Maximize the impact of your research by publishing high-quality articles. A richly edited text with flawless grammar may be all you need to capture the eye of other authors and researchers in your field. With Elsevier, you have the guarantee of excellent output, no matter the topic or your target journal.

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What Is Good H-Index? H-Index Required For An Academic Position

In the academic world, the h-index score stands as a pivotal metric, gauging the impact and breadth of a researcher’s work. Understanding what constitutes a good h-index is crucial for academics at all stages, from budding PhD students to seasoned professors.

This article looks into the h-index, exploring what scores are considered impressive across various disciplines and career stages.

• PhD Student: An h-index between 1 and 5 is typical for PhD students nearing the end of their program, reflecting their early stage in academic publishing.
• Postdoc and Assistant Professor: Early career researchers like postdoctoral fellows or assistant professors often find an h-index around 5 to 10 impressive, indicating a solid start in their respective fields.
• Associate Professor: At this more advanced stage, an h-index of 10 or more is generally expected, reflecting a consistent record of impactful research.
• Full Professor: For full professors, an h-index of 15 or higher is often seen, indicating a long and impactful career in research and academia.

How To Calculate Your H-Index Score?

In the academic world, the h-index score is a critical metric, essentially acting like a report card for scholars.

The h-index is a measure of a researcher’s productivity and impact. H-index was designed to assess the number of papers published and the number of citations each paper receives. 

Now that you know what is a h-index score, you may now wonder if you can find out your own. Good thing is that platforms like Google Scholar or Web of Science can come in handy.

They track your number of publications and the number of times those publications are cited, crunching these numbers into your h-index.

This number can vary based on the field and years of research experience. A full professor might be expected to have a higher h-index, reflecting more years of impactful research.

Google Scholar

To find out your h-index score from Google Scholar, you can follow the steps below:

• Create a Google Scholar Profile : If you don’t already have one, go to Google Scholar and create a profile. Fill in your academic details and affiliations.
• Add Publications : Ensure all your research publications are listed in your profile. You can add them manually or import them if they are already available on Google Scholar.
• Verify your Publications : Make sure the publications listed are indeed yours, as sometimes publications from other authors with similar names might appear.
• Check the Citations Section : Once your profile is complete and updated, look for the ‘Citations’ section on your profile page. This is usually located at the top and easy to spot.
• Find Your H-Index : In the Citations section, you will see your h-index listed among other citation metrics like the total number of citations and the i10-index.

Web Of Science

To find out your h-index score from Web Of Science, you can follow the steps below:

• Access Web of Science : Go to the Web of Science website. Access may require an institutional login, depending on your affiliation.
• Search for Your Name : Use the author search function to find your publications. Ensure you search with variations of your name if you’ve published under different names or initials.
• Create a Citation Report : Once your publications are listed, select them and create a citation report. This option is typically found above the list of your publications.
• View Your H-Index : In the citation report, your h-index will be displayed. This number is calculated based on the total number of papers you’ve published and the number of citations each paper has received.

What H-Index Is Considered Good For A PhD Student?

For a PhD student, the world of academic metrics can be daunting, especially when it comes to the h-index, a measure that intertwines the number of publications with their citation impact.

So, what h-index score should you, as a PhD student, aim for?

A “good” h-index can vary based on your field of study and the stage of your PhD program.

Generally, for PhD students, a lower h-index is expected and completely normal. You’re just beginning your journey in academic publishing.

An h-index between 1 and 5 might be typical for students nearing the end of their PhD. This means you have 1 to 5 publications that have been cited at least 1 to 5 times, respectively.

Your h-index can be calculated using tools like Google Scholar or Web of Science. These platforms track your published papers and the number of citations each receives.

As a PhD student, your focus should be on publishing quality research in reputable journals, as this will gradually increase your h-index.

Remember, while a higher h-index is beneficial for future academic positions, it’s not the only metric that matters. Your research’s quality, relevance, and impact in your field are equally important. A single highly influential paper might open more doors than several less impactful ones.

What Are Good H-Index Required For An Academic Position?

your h-index can be as crucial as your research itself. This metric, a blend of productivity and impact, is often scrutinized by hiring committees.

But what number should you aim for? A good h-index varies by field and career stage.

PostDoc, Assistant Professors

For early career researchers, like postdoctoral fellows or assistant professors, an h-index around 5 to 10 is often impressive.

It shows you’ve made a mark in your field, with a number of papers that have been cited at least that many times. 

Associate Professor, Full Professor

In more senior roles, such as a tenured associate professor or full professor, expectations rise.

Here, an h-index of 10 or 15 might be the minimum, with higher numbers not uncommon.

This single number, while important, doesn’t tell the whole story. A young researcher might have a lower h-index simply due to less time in the field. Moreover, some fields tend to have higher citation rates, which can inflate h-index scores.

It’s wise to keep an eye on your h-index, especially if you’re eyeing:

• Competitive academic positions,
• Research funding
• Collaboration opportunities.

Improving your h-index involves not just publishing papers, but ensuring they are of high quality and relevance, increasing the likelihood of citations.

In sum, a good h-index is one that matches your career stage and field, reflecting both the quantity and impact of your work. However, it’s not the sole measure of your worth as a researcher.

The breadth and depth of your contributions, beyond just citation counts, also paint a vivid picture of your academic and scientific impact.

What Metric Influences H-Index Score?

Your h-index score is influenced by several key factors:

• Number of Publications : The more papers you publish, the greater the potential for citations. It’s a numbers game, but quality over quantity should be your mantra. High-caliber papers in respected journals often garner more attention and citations.
• Citations Per Publication : Your h-index heavily relies on how often your papers are cited. Even if you have a plethora of publications, your h-index won’t shine if they’re seldom cited.
• Years of Research Experience : A young researcher might have a lower h-index compared to a full professor, who has had more time to build their citation record.
• Research Field : The h-index varies widely across disciplines. Fields with rapid publication and citation rates like biomedical sciences often see higher h-index scores than, say, humanities. So, a good h-index in one field might be considered low in another.
• Access to Research Collaborations : Collaborations can boost your h-index. Working with other researchers, can increase the visibility and citation potential of your papers. However, too many authors on a single paper might dilute the perceived contribution of each.

Remember, while a high h-index can be indicative of a significant academic impact, it’s not the sole measure of your scientific worth. It’s a good idea to give your h-index some consideration, but also focus on the broader spectrum of your academic contributions.

How To Increase H-Index Score?

Increasing your h-index, a metric reflecting the impact and productivity of your academic work, is a strategic goal for many researchers.

This single number, representing the intersection of the quantity of your publications and their citation impact, can play a pivotal role in securing research grants and academic positions.

To boost your h-index, focus on publishing quality research in well-regarded journals. A paper published in a respected journal is more likely to be cited, and each citation nudges your h-index upwards.

For example, if you’re an assistant professor with an h-index of 5, aiming for journals with high visibility in your field can help you reach a higher h-index, making you more competitive for positions like associate or full professor.

Collaboration is another key strategy. Co-authoring with established researchers can increase the reach and citation potential of your papers.

This, however, comes with a caveat: the more number of authors on a paper, the more diluted your perceived contribution might be. Aim for a balance in co-authorship.

Active engagement in the academic community also matters. Increase citations on your work by:

• Presenting at conferences,
• networking, and
• promoting your work on platforms like Google Scholar or Web of Science.

Remember, the h-index varies by field and career stage. A good h-index for a young researcher might be 10, while more senior academics might aim for higher numbers. Using databases like Google Scholar, you can track your number of cited publications and calculate your h-index.

While a higher h-index can bolster your academic profile, it’s not the sole indicator of your scholarly worth – low h-index score is not a dealbreaker in many cases. It’s wise to consider it alongside other measures of your academic and scientific impact.

Good H-Index Score May Vary

A good h-index score is relative, varying across academic fields and career stages. While it offers a valuable snapshot of a researcher’s impact and productivity, it’s important to view it as one part of a larger picture.

Aspiring for a higher h-index should go hand in hand with maintaining the quality and relevance of research. Ultimately, the h-index is a useful tool, but it’s the depth and innovation of your work that truly define your academic legacy.

Dr Andrew Stapleton has a Masters and PhD in Chemistry from the UK and Australia. He has many years of research experience and has worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate at a number of Universities. Although having secured funding for his own research, he left academia to help others with his YouTube channel all about the inner workings of academia and how to make it work for you.

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What is the H-index, and Does it Matter?

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The h-index is a measure of research performance and is calculated as the highest number of manuscripts from an author (h) that all have at least the same number (h) of citations. The h-index is known to penalize early career researchers and does not take into account the number of authors on a paper. Alternative indexes have been created, including the i-10, h-frac, G-index, and M-number.

How do you measure how good you are as a scientist? How would you compare the impact of two scientists in a field? What if you had to decide which one would get a grant? One method is the h-index, which we will discuss in more detail below. First, we’ll touch on why this is not a simple task.

Measuring scientific performance is more complicated and more critical than it might first seem. Various methods for measurement and comparison have been proposed, but none of them is perfect.

At first, you might think that the method for measuring scientific performance doesn’t concern you—because all you care about is doing the best research you can. However, you should care because these metrics are increasingly used by funding bodies and employers to allocate grants and jobs. So, your perceived scientific performance score could seriously affect your career.

Metrics for Measuring Scientific Performance

What are the metrics involved in measuring scientific performance? The methods that might first spring to mind are:

• Recommendations from peers. At first glance, this is a good idea in principle. However, it is subject to human nature, so personal relationships will inevitably affect perceived performance. Also, if a lesser-known scientist publishes a ground-breaking paper, they would likely get less recognition than if a more eminent colleague published the same paper.
• The number of articles published. A long publication list looks good on your CV, but the number of articles published does not indicate their impact on the field. Having a few publications well-heeded by colleagues in the field (i.e., they are cited often) is better than having a long list of publications cited poorly or not at all.
• The average number of citations per article published. So, if it’s citations we’re interested in, then surely the average number of citations per paper is a better number to look at. Well, not really. The average could be skewed dramatically by one highly cited article, so it does not allow a good comparison of overall performance.

The H-Index

In 2005, Jorge E. Hirsch of UCSD published a paper in PNAS in which he put forward the h-index as a metric for measuring and comparing the overall scientific productivity of individual scientists. [1]

The h-index has been quickly adopted as the metric of choice for many committees and bodies.

How to Calculate An Author’s H-Index

The h-index calculation is pretty simple. You plot the number of papers versus the number of citations you (or someone else) have received, and the h-index is the number of papers at which the 45-degree line (citations=papers, orange) intercepts the curve, as shown in Figure 1 . That is, h equals the number of papers that have received at least h citations. For example, do you have one publication that has been cited at least once? If the answer is yes, then you can go on to your next publication. Have your two publications each been cited at least twice? If yes, then your h-index is at least 2. You can keep going until you get to a “no.”

So, if you have an h-index of 20, you have 20 papers with at least 20 citations. It also means that you are doing pretty well with your science!

What is a Good H-Index?

Hirsch reckons that after 20 years of research, an h-index of 20 is good, 40 is outstanding, and 60 is truly exceptional.

In his paper, Hirsch shows that successful scientists do, indeed, have high h-indices: 84% of Nobel Prize winners in physics, for example, had an h-index of at least 30. Table 1 lists some eminent scientists and their respective h-indexes.

Table 1: H-index scores of some Nobel Laureates (data from Google Scholar collected on September 27, 2023).

Advantages of the H-Index

The advantage of the h-index is that it combines productivity (i.e., number of papers produced) and impact (number of citations) in a single number. So, both productivity and impact are required for a high h-index; neither a few highly cited papers nor a long list of papers with only a handful of (or no!) citations will yield a high h-index.

Limitations of the H-Index

Although having a single number that measures scientific performance is attractive, the h-index is only a rough indicator of scientific performance and should only be considered as such.

Limitations of the h-index include the following:

• It does not take into account the number of authors on a paper. A scientist who is the sole author of a paper with 100 citations should get more credit than one on a similarly cited paper with 10 co-authors.
• It penalizes early-career scientists. Outstanding scientists with only a few publications cannot have a high h-index, even if all of those publications are ground-breaking and highly cited. For example, Albert Einstein would have had an h-index of only 4 or 5 if he had died in early 1906 despite being widely known as an influential physicist at the time.
• Review articles have a greater impact on the h-index than original papers since they are generally cited more often.
• The use of the h-index has now broadened beyond science. However, it’s difficult to compare fields and scientific disciplines directly, so, really, a ‘good’ h-index is impossible to define.

Calculating the H-Index

There are several online resources and h-index calculators for obtaining a scientist’s h-index. The most established are ISI Web of Knowledge, and Scopus, both of which require a subscription (probably via your institution), but there are free options too, one of which is Publish or Perish .

You might get a different value if you check your own (or someone else’s) h-index with each of these resources. Each uses a different database to count the total publications and citations. ISI and Scopus use their own databases, and Publish or Perish uses Google Scholar. Each database has different coverage and will provide varying h-index values. For example, ISI has good coverage of journal publications but poor coverage of conferences, while Scopus covers conferences better but needs better journal coverage pre-1992. [2]

Is the H-index Still Effective?

A paper published in PLoS One in 2021 concluded that while a scientist’s h-index previously correlated well with the number of scientific awards, this is no longer the case. This lack of correlation is partly because of the change in authorship patterns, with the average number of authors per paper increasing. [3]

Are Alternatives to the H-Index Better?

Let’s take a look at some of the alternative measures available.

The H-Frac Index

The authors of the PLoS One paper suggest fractional analogs of the h-index are better suited for the job. [3] Here, the number of authors on a paper is also considered. One such measure is the h-frac, where citation counts are divided by the number of authors. However, this solution could also be manipulated to the detriment of more junior researchers, as minimizing the number of authors on a paper would maximize your h-frac score. This could mean more junior researchers are left off papers where they did contribute, harming their careers. 

The G-Index

This measure looks at the most highly cited articles of an author and is defined as “the largest number n of highly cited articles for which the average number of citations is at least n .” [4] This measure allows highly cited papers to bolster lower cited papers of an author. 

The i-10 Index

Developed by Google Scholar, this index is the number of articles published by an author that have received at least 10 citations. This measure, along with the h-index, is available on Google Scholar.

The m-value was developed to try to balance the scales for early career researchers. It corrects the h-index for time, allowing for easier comparison of researchers with different seniority and career lengths. It is calculated as the h-index divided by the number of years.

The Problem with Measuring Performance

While these numbers can be helpful to give a flavor of a scientist’s performance, they are all flawed. Many are biased towards researchers who publish often and are further into their careers. Many of these indexes can also be manipulated, such as adding extra authors to papers who didn’t contribute.

In reality, it isn’t possible to distill a researcher’s contributions to a single number. They may not have published many papers, but those papers they have published made vital contributions. Or their skills are in training the next round of researchers. When looking at these numbers, we should remember they are just a reflection of one small part of a researcher’s contributions and values and are not the be-all and end-all.

The H-Index Summed Up

The h-index provides a useful metric for scientific performance, but only when viewed in the context of other factors. While other measures are available, including the i-10 index, the G-index, and the h-frac index, these also have limitations. Therefore, when making decisions that are important to you (funding, job, finding a PI), be sure to read through publication lists, talk to other scientists (and students) and peers, and take account of career stage. So, remember that an h-index is only one consideration among many—and you should definitely know your h-index—but it doesn’t define you (or anyone else) as a scientist.

• Hirsch JE. (2005) An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output . PNAS 102(46):16569–72
• Meho LI, Yang K. (2007) Impact of data sources on citation counts and rankings of LIS faculty: Web of science versus scopus and google scholar . JASIST 58(13):2105–25
• Koltun V, Hafner D. (2021) The h-index is no longer an effective correlate of scientific reputation . PLoS One . 16(6):e0253397
• Wikipedia. g-index . Accessed 25 September 2023

Originally published April 2, 2009. Reviewed and updated October 2023.

It seems doubtful whether all fields of research can be effectively measured in this way. I am a First World War historian. If I want to be cited a lot, I will write about very popular questions (masculinity, identity, space etc at the moment). If I go off into virgin territory and explore, for the first time ever, say, comparative studies of First World War popular music, I will get far fewer citations for a good while, and this may see, a strange reward for asking rarer questions. Whereas asking rare questions, in history, is a key skill (see Keith Thomas for example). This is one of the reasons that scholarly human sciences organizations in France where I live often refuse to use bibliometric indexes of this sort.

I’ve recently proposed a novel index for evaluation of individual researchers that does not depend on the number of publications, accounts for different co-author contributions and age of publications, and scales from 0.0 to 9.9 ( https://f1000research.com/articles/4-884 ). Moreover, it can be calculated with the help of freely available software. Please, share your thoughts on it. Would you use it along with the h-index, or maybe even instead of it, for evaluating your peers, potential collaborators or job applicants? If you’ve tried it on the people you know, do you find the results fair?

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Reference management. Clean and simple.

What is the h-index?

A simple definition of the h-index

Step-by-step outline: how to calculate your h-index, why it is important for your career to know about the h-index, can all your academic achievements be summarized by a single number, frequently asked questions about h-index, related articles.

An h-index is a rough summary measure of a researcher’s productivity and impact. Productivity is quantified by the number of papers, and impact by the number of citations the researchers' publications have received.

The h-index can be useful for identifying the centrality of certain researchers as researchers with a higher h-index will, in general, have produced more work that is considered important by their peers.

The h-index was originally defined by J. E. Hirsch in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article as the number of papers with citation number ≥ h . An h-index of 3 hence means that the author has published at least three articles, of which each has been cited at least three times.

The h-index can also simply be determined by charting the article's citation counts. The h-index is then determined by the interception of the chart's diagonal with the citation data. In this case, there are 3 papers that are above the diagonal, and hence the h-index is 3.

The definition of the h-index comes with quite a few desirable features:

• First, it is relatively unaffected by outliers. If e.g. the top-ranked article had been cited 1,000 times, this would not change the h-index.
• Second, the h-index will generally only increase if the researcher continues to produce good work. The h-index would increase to 4 if another paper was added with 4 citations, but would not increase if papers were added with fewer citations.
• Third, the h-index will never be greater than the number of papers the author has published; to have an h-index of 20, the author must have published at least 20 articles which have each been cited at least 20 times.
• Step 1 : List all your published articles in a table.
• Step 2 : For each article gather the number of how often it has been cited.
• Step 3 : Rank the papers by the number of times they have been cited.
• Step 4 : The h-index can now be inferred by finding the entry at which the rank in the list is greater than the number of citations.

Here is an example of a table where articles have been ranked by their citation count and the h-index has been inferred to be 3.

Luckily, there are services like Scopus , Web of Science , and Google Scholar that can do the heavy lifting and automatically provide the citation count data and calculate the h-index.

The h-index is not something that needs to be calculated on a daily basis, but it's good to know where you are for several reasons. First, climbing the h-index ladder is something worth celebrating. If it's worth opening a bottle of champagne or just getting a cafe latte, that's up to you, but seriously take your time to celebrate this achievement (there aren't that many in academia). But more importantly, the h-index is one of the measures funding agencies or the university's hiring committee calculate when you apply for a grant or a position. Given the often huge number of applications, the h-index is calculated in order to rank candidates and apply a pre-filter.

Of course, funding agencies and hiring committees do use tools for calculating the h-index, and so can you.

It is important to note that depending on the underlying data that these services have collected, your h-index might be different. Let's have a look at the h-index of the well-known physicist Stephen W. Hawking to illustrate it:

So, if you are aware of a number of citations of your work that are not listed in these databases, e.g. because they are in conference proceedings not indexed in these databases, then please state that in your application. It might give your h-index an extra boost.

➡️ Learn more: What is a good h-index?

Definitely not! People are aware of this, and there have been many attempts to address particular shortcomings of the h-index, but in the end, it's just another number that is meant to emphasize or de-emphasize certain aspects of the h-index. Anyway, you have to know the rules in order to play the game, and you have to know the rules in order to change them. If you feel that your h-index does not properly reflect your academic achievements, then be proactive and mention it in your application!

An h-index is a rough summary measure of a researcher’s productivity and impact . Productivity is quantified by the number of papers, and impact by the number of citations the researchers' publications have received.

Google Scholar can automatically calculate your h-index, read our guide How to calculate your h-index on Google Scholar for further instructions.

Even though Scopus needs to crunch millions of citations to find the h-index, the look-up is pretty fast. Read our guide How to calculate your h-index using Scopus for further instructions.

Web of Science is a database that has compiled millions of articles and citations. This data can be used to calculate all sorts of bibliographic metrics including an h-index. Read our guide How to use Web of Science to calculate your h-index for further instructions.

The h-index is not something that needs to be calculated on a daily basis, but it's good to know where you are for several reasons. First, climbing the h-index ladder is something worth celebrating. But more importantly, the h-index is one of the measures funding agencies or the university's hiring committee calculate when you apply for a grant or a position. Given the often huge number of applications, the h-index is calculated in order to rank candidates and apply a pre-filter.

Measuring your research impact: H-Index

Getting Started

Journal Citation Reports (JCR)

Eigenfactor and Article Influence

Scimago Journal and Country Rank

Google Scholar Metrics

Web of Science Citation Tools

Google Scholar Citations

PLoS Article-Level Metrics

Publish or Perish

• Author disambiguation
• Broadening your impact

Table of Contents

Author Impact

Journal Impact

Tracking and Measuring Your Impact

Author Disambiguation

Broadening Your Impact

Other H-Index Resources

• An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output This is the original paper by J.E. Hirsch proposing and describing the H-index.

H-Index in Web of Science

The Web of Science uses the H-Index to quantify research output by measuring author productivity and impact.

H-Index = number of papers ( h ) with a citation number ≥ h .  

Example: a scientist with an H-Index of 37 has 37 papers cited at least 37 times.  

Advantages of the H-Index:

• Allows for direct comparisons within disciplines
• Measures quantity and impact by a single value.

Disadvantages of the H-Index:

• Does not give an accurate measure for early-career researchers
• Calculated by using only articles that are indexed in Web of Science.  If a researcher publishes an article in a journal that is not indexed by Web of Science, the article as well as any citations to it will not be included in the H-Index calculation.

Tools for measuring H-Index:

• Web of Science
• Google Scholar

This short clip helps to explain the limitations of the H-Index for early-career scientists:

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Understanding the H-index: A Comprehensive Guide

Table of Contents

Research metrics play a crucial role in evaluating a researcher's impact and contributions. One such metric gaining prominence is the H-index. But what exactly is the H-index, and why does it matter in academic circles?

Let's dive into the details to unravel the mysteries surrounding this metric.

What is h-index?

The h-index, also known as the Hirsch index or Hirsch number, is a metric that attempts to measure the productivity and citation impact of a scientist or researcher. It was introduced by physicist Jorge E. Hirsch in 2005 as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is now used in all disciplines. But what exactly is the h-index, and how is it calculated? Let’s unveil!

The h-index is an author-level metric that measures researchers' productivity and citation impact of their publications. The h-index is calculated based on the range of the researcher's most cited papers and the number of citations they have acquired in other publications.

The h-index can also be applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal as well as a group of scientists, such as a department, university, or country.

How to calculate the h-index?

The h-index is derived by counting the number of scientific publications for which an author has garnered citations from other authors, at least an equal number of times. For example, an h-index of 28 means that the scientist has published at least 28 papers that have each been cited at least 28 times.

Suppose a researcher has the following number of citations for each of their papers, in decreasing order: 10, 8, 5, 4, 3, and 1. The h-index is 4 because the researcher has 4 papers with at least 4 citations. The fifth paper only has 3 citations, so it does not meet the h-index criteria.

Tools for Calculating the h-index

Several databases and tools can calculate an author's h-index. Google Scholar is a popular choice because it automatically calculates the h-index of the authors and includes citations from a wide variety of sources. Other databases that can calculate the h-index include Scopus, SciSpace, and Web of Science.

It's important to note that the calculated h-index can vary significantly between different databases. This is because the databases may not include all the same journals or conference proceedings, and they may calculate citations differently.

Advantages of the h-index

The h-index has several advantages over other bibliometric measures. It combines the effect of the number of publications with the number of citations per publication, so it gives more weight to sustained contributions over time. Here are the prominent advantages of the h-index metric.

Peer Recognition

The H-index reflects peer recognition, as a higher index indicates sustained impact and acknowledgment within the academic community.

Measurement of Research Impact

In addition to recognizing a researcher's impact, the H-index measures the reach and influence of their work, providing a quantitative assessment of scholarly contributions.

Academic Promotions

Comparing H-indices allows institutions to evaluate and compare researchers objectively, aiding in hiring decisions and academic promotions.

Balanced measure

Another advantage is that the h-index is not influenced by one or two highly cited papers, which can significantly increase the citation count. Similarly, the h-index is not affected by a large number of poorly cited papers. This makes it a more balanced measure than simply counting the number of publications or citations.

Limitations of the h-index

Despite its advantages, the h-index also has several limitations. The following are some of them:

Overemphasis on Quantity

Critics argue that the H-index may prioritize quantity over quality, potentially encouraging researchers to focus on prolificacy rather than the depth of their contributions.

Disciplinary Variations

The H-index's effectiveness can vary across disciplines, posing challenges in creating a universally applicable metric for academic evaluation.

Manipulation Possibilities

Some researchers may attempt to manipulate their H-index by self-citations or collaborative strategies, raising ethical concerns in academic evaluations.

Alternatives to the h-index

Given the limitations of the h-index, several alternative metrics have been proposed. These include the g-index, the e-index, the i10-index, and the m-quotient.

The g-index is an index that gives more weight to highly cited articles. The e-index complements the h-index by differentiating scientists with the same h-index but different citation distributions. The i10-index is the number of publications with at least 10 citations. The m-quotient is the h-index divided by the number of years since the first published paper by the scientist.

Choosing the Right Metric

Choosing the right metric depends on the context and the specific needs of the evaluation. The h-index and its alternatives each have their strengths and weaknesses, and they provide different perspectives on an author's impact and productivity. Therefore, it is often helpful to consider multiple metrics when evaluating a researcher's output.

In conclusion, the h-index is a useful tool for measuring the productivity and impact of a researcher's work. While it has its limitations and critics, it provides a more balanced measure than simply counting publications or citations. As with any metric, it should be used in conjunction with other measures to provide a comprehensive view of a researcher's contributions to their field.

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What is the h-index?

Use of the h-index is controversial. Some organizations use the h-index for evaluating researchers while others do not use it. As information professionals, we do not advise using the h-index without fully understanding its limitations and caveats.

Use the h-index with extreme caution.

• Article: An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output by J. E. Hirsch, 2005. "I propose the index h, defined as the number of papers with citation number ≥h, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher."
• Blog post: Halt the h-index by Sarah de Rijcke, Ludo Waltman, and Thed van Leeuwen, 2021. "Using the h-index in research evaluation? Rather not. But why not, actually? Why is using this indicator so problematic? And what are the alternatives anyway?"

Image: Screenshot of some metrics listed in an author profile in Michigan Experts. Includes the h-index from 4 different sources: Scopus, Dimensions, Web of Science, and Europe PMC.

• This indicator typically varies by source (e.g., different values in Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science).
• It is not field-normalized and is not an accurate comparison of productivity across disciplines.
• It is weighted positively towards mid and late-career researchers as publications have had more time to accrue citations.

There are several variations of the h-index, including:

• i10-index A productivity indicator created by Google Scholar and used in Google's My Citations feature. It represents the number of publications with at least 10 citations.
• g-index Created by Leo Egghe in 2006, the g-index gives more weight to authors' highly cited articles.

Where can I find my h-index?

The resources below contain author profiles which list an h-index. Remember, this metric typically varies by source, so an author's h-index in Scopus may be different than the one in Google Scholar.

• Scopus 1. Once in Scopus, select "Authors" and perform search for your name. 2. Click on the correct name in the search results to view the full author profile, where the h-index is listed. 3. Click on "Analyze author output" for additional citation data.
• Web of Science 1. Once in Web of Science, click on "Author Search" and search for your name. 2. Click on the correct name in the list of results to view the full author profile, including the h-index.
• Google Scholar @ U-M 1. Search for the author or an article by the author. 2. On the search results page, click on the author's name to view their Google Scholar profile which includes the h-index. Note: not all authors have Google Scholar profiles; underlined author names indicate that a profile page exists.
• Michigan Experts 1. In the bottom right, under "Useful Links" click on "Edit Your Michigan Experts Profile." 2. Log in with your U-M id and password. 3. Scroll down to the box called "H-Index" and h-index is listed there for the data sources that Michigan Experts uses.

What is the h-index?

• Research Process

In this article, we explain where the h-index comes from and how it is calculated. You will be ready to put the h-index into context and discuss what it means to you as a researcher, where you can find it, and why it is important.

Updated on November 3, 2022

Knowing your h -index is an essential step to measuring the impact your research is having on your field and discipline. In this article, you will learn the basics of the h -index and how it applies to your research career.

You are getting your research out into the world, preprints, presentations, publications. People are reading it, discussing it, citing it. And you know this is important, not only for current projects but also for all those in the future.

How do you measure and share this exciting progress?

With so many metrics used to assess the quality and impact of your research, it can be hard to

tell them apart. The h -index deserves some undivided attention, though. It is often used to rank candidates for grant funding, fellowships and other research positions.

In this article, we will talk about where the h -index comes from and how it is calculated. And with that background, we will be ready to put the h -index into context and discuss what it means to you as a researcher, where you can find it when you need it, and why it is important to seriously consider.

Background of the h -index

J.E. Hirsch first proposed the h -index in 2005 in his article An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. He argued that two individuals with similar hs would be comparable in terms of their overall scientific impact, even if their total number of papers or their total number of citations were very different (Hirsch, 2005). Making the metric an equalizer of sorts.

In practice, the total number of citations and papers are plotted on a graph like this (Wikimedia Commons, 2008). The h -index, then, is defined as the maximum value of h such that the given author or journal has published at least h papers that have each been cited at least h times (McDonald, 2005). Making an author's greatest possible h -index limited to their total number of papers. As shown by the green square that is intersected by the dashed line on the graph.

In other words, an author with 1 paper that has 1 or more citations can have a maximum h -index of 1. In the same way, an author with several papers that each have 1 citation would also have a h -index of 1.

How do you calculate the h -index?

We can start by looking at the h -index in the simplest terms. If an author has 10 papers where each has at least 10 citations, then their h -index is 10. If, however, an author has five papers with 12, 6, 5, 2, and 1 citations respectively, then the author's h -index is 3. This is because the author has only three papers with 3 or more citations. So, the h -index of 3 is where the h citations and the h papers would meet at the top corner of the green square in the graph we looked at above.

If you want to calculate an h -index manually, make a table with two columns. In the left column, assign ascending numbers beginning with 1 and going all the way to account for the author's total number of papers. In the right column, arrange the number of citations for the author's papers in descending order, where the biggest number is paired with the 1st paper.

Next, you move down the list until the paper number on the left is greater than the citation number on the right. Draw a line just above this position to look like the table below (MUHC Libraries, 2015). The h -index then equals the paper number just above the line. In this case the h -index is 8 because 8 articles have been cited at least 8 or more times. The remaining articles have been cited 8 times or less.

In this way, the h -index provides a more comprehensive view of the productivity and impact of a researcher's work than the simpler metrics of the total number of papers or the total number of citations. And, at the same time, the h -index simplifies the same information by converting it into one easy to digest number.

h -index tools and resources

While knowing your h -index is useful, gathering all the data and calculating it yourself can be a pain. Fortunately, many of the resources you are already using to promote and track research papers offer convenient tools for generating h -index metrics.

• Google Scholar -  Finding  h -index in Google Scholar - Ask Us
• Publish or Perish-  Results pane from Publish or Perish 4.22 onward
• Web of Science -  Tutorial:  h -index in Web of Science - Evaluating scholarly publications - LibGuides at Tritonia
• Scopus -  Tutorial:  h -index in Scopus - Evaluating scholarly publications - LibGuides at Tritonia
• Pure -  Pure | The world’s leading RIMS or CRIS | Elsevier Solutions

It is a good idea to periodically check and compare your h -index from each of these resources. Chances are, the results will not match.

Each database calculates the h -index based only on the citations it contains. In the same way, software programs like Publish or Perish and management systems like Pure use a limited amount of citation data.

No single system retrieves and analyzes all citation information from all sources. This results in dissimilar h -index values. The databases also cover different journals over different ranges of years, which makes the h -index results vary.

Looking at how individual sources calculate your h -index and how it changes over time will help you recognize which of these is more accurate for your personal research career, field, and situation.

What is a good h -index?

Just as your h -index may vary from source to source, its weight and value are also on a sliding scale. An h -index number that is considered good in one area of research may only be subpar in another.

This is because every organization, institution, funding group, and hiring committee has its own set of requirements for any given research project or position. So, the idea of an acceptable or competitive h -index will change accordingly.

Many agree, however, that a satisfactory h -index will closely mirror the number of years a person has been working in their field. For example, h -index scores between 3 and 5 are common for new assistant professors, scores between 8 and 12 are standard for promotion to tenured associate professor, and scores between 15 and 20 are appropriate for becoming a full professor (Tetzner, 2021).

This is not a set guideline by any means. Rather a general explanation to use when setting your professional goals. That being said, you need to also stay current with your field's practices regarding the h -index. And, always thoroughly check the h -index requirements for all applications you submit.

What are the pros and cons of the h -index?

Some people appreciate the h -index, some loathe it, and others have no opinion at all. Most who are familiar with the h -index, though, have a healthy level of respect while understanding that, like all metrics, it is imperfect.

Even at the dawn of its creation, Hirsch recognized the following advantages and disadvantages of his h -index (Hirsch, 2005):

• It combines a measure of quantity (publications) and impact (citations).
• It allows us to characterize the scientific output of a researcher with objectivity.
• It performs better than other single-number criteria used to evaluate the scientific output of a researcher (impact factor, total number of documents, total number of citations, citation per paper rate and number of highly cited papers).
• The h -index can be easily obtained by anyone.
• There are inter-field differences in typical h values due to differences among fields in productivity and citation practices.
• The h -index depends on the duration of each scientist's career because the pool of publications and citations increases over time.
• There are also technical limitations, such as the difficulty to obtain the complete output of scientists with very common names, or whether self-citations should be removed or not.
• “A single number can never give more than a rough approximation to an individual's multifaceted profile, and many other factors should be considered in combination in evaluating an individual (Hirsch, 2005).”

Final thoughts

During your research career, there will be many circumstances when you will inevitably have to interact with the h -index. Having a foundation of knowledge before that time comes is key to ensuring that your h -index is an asset and not a liability.

The information in this article will help you start laying the groundwork for clearly understanding the h -index. Where it comes from, how it is calculated, where to find it, and how it impacts your research career. It is one more vital step to ensuring that your valuable research finds its way out into the world.

• Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. PNAS, 102(46), 16569-72. PMC. Retrieved Oct 26, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1283832/
• McDonald, K. (2005, November 8). Physicist Proposes New Way to Rank Scientific Output. Phys.org. Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://phys.org/news/2005-11-physicist-scientific-output.html
• MUHC Libraries. (2015, Jul 01). What's your impact? Calculating your h-index | McGill University Health Centre Libraries. MUHC Libraries. Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://www.muhclibraries.ca/training-and-consulting/guides-and-tutorials/whats-your-impact-calculating-your-h-index/
• Tetzner, R. (2021, September 3). What Is a Good h-Index Required for an Academic Position? Journal-Publishing.com. Retrieved October 27, 2022, from https://www.journal-publishing.com/blog/good-h-index-required-academic-position/
• Wikimedia Commons. (2008, Feb 01). File:h-index-en.svg. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:h-index-en.svg

Charla Viera, MS

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• Research guides

Assessing Article and Author Influence

Finding an author's h-index, the h-index: a brief guide.

This page provides an overview of the H-Index, an attempt to measure the research impact of a scholar. The topics include:

What is the H-Index?

How is the h-index computed, factors to bear in mind.

• Using Harzing's Publish or Publish to Assess the H-Index

Using Web of Science to Assess the H-Index

• H-Index Video

Contemporary H-Index

Selected further reading.

The h-index, created by Jorge E. Hirsch in 2005, is an attempt to measure the research impact of a scholar. In his 2005 article Hirsch put forward "an easily computable index, h, which gives an estimate of the importance, significance, and broad impact of a scientist's cumulative research contributions." He believed "that this index may provide a useful yardstick with which to compare, in an unbiased way, different individuals competing for the same resource when an important evaluation criterion is scientific achievement." There has been much controversy over the value of the h-index, in particular whether its merits outweigh its weaknesses. There has also been much debate concerning the optimal methodology to use in assessing the index.  In locating someone's h-index a number of methodologies/databases may be used. Two major ones are ISI's Web of Science and the free Harzing's Publish or Perish which uses Google Scholar data.

An h-index of 20 signifies that a scientist has published 20 articles each of which has been cited at least 20 times. Sometimes the h=index is, arguably, misleading. For example, if a scholar's works have received, say, 10,000 citations he may still have a h-index of only 12 as only 12 of his papers have been cited at least 12 times. This can happen when one of his papers has been cited thousands and thousands of times. So, to have a high h-index one must have published a large number of papers. There have been instances of Nobel Prize winners in scientific fields who have a relatively low h-index. This is due to them having published one or a very small number of extremely influential papers and maybe numerous other papers that were not so important and, consequently, not well cited.

• As citation practices/patterns can vary quite widely across disciplines, it is not advisable to use h-index scores to assess the research impact of personnel in different disciplines.
• The h-index is not very widely used in the Arts and Humanities.
• H-index scores can vary widely depending on the methodology/database used. This is because different methodologies draw upon different citation data. When comparing different people’s H-Index it’s essential to use the same methodology. The h-index does not distinguish the relative contributions of authors in multi-author articles.
• The h-index may vary significantly depending on how long the scholar has been publishing and on the number of articles they’ve published. Older, more prolific scholars will tend to have a higher h-index than younger, less productive ones.
• The h-index can never decrease. This, at times, can be a problem as it does not indicate the decreasing productivity and influence of a scholar.

Using Harzing's Publish or Publish to Assess the H-Index

Publish or Perish utilizes data from Google Scholar. Its software may be downloaded from the Publish or Perish website . A person's h-index located through Publish or Perish is often higher than the same person's index located by means of ISI's Web of Science . This is primarily because the Google Scholar data utilized by Publish or Perish includes a much wider range of sources, e.g. working papers, conference papers, technical reports etc., than does Web of Science . It has often been observed that Web of Science may sometimes produce a more authoritative h-index than Publish or Perish. This tends to be more likely in certain disciplines in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

After you've launched the application, click on "Author impact" on top. Enter the author's name as initial and surname enclosed with quotation marks, e.g. "S Helluy". Then click "Lookup" (top right). You'll see a screen with a listing of S. Helluy's works arranged by number of citations. Above this listing is a smaller panel where one may see the h-index score of 17:

Publish or Perish uses Google Scholar data and these data occasionally split a single paper into multiple entries. This is usually due to incorrect or sloppy referencing of a paper by others, which causes Google Scholar to believe that the referenced works are different. However, you can merge duplicate records in the Publish or Perish results list. You do this by dragging one item and dropping it onto another; the resulting item has a small "double document" icon as illustrated below:

• Alan Marnett (2010). "H-Index: What It Is and How to Find Yours"
• Harzing, Anne-Wil (2008) Reflections on the H-Index .
• Hirsch, J. E. (15 November 2005). "An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output" . PNAS 102 (46): 16569–16572.
• A. M. Petersen, H. E. Stanley, and S. Succi (2011). "Statistical Regularities in the Rank-Citation Profile of Scientists" Nature Scientific Reports 181 : 1–7.
• Williams, Antony (2011). Calculating my H Index With Free Available Tools .

If you are using Clarivate's Web of Science database to assess a h-index, it is important to remember that Web of Science uses only those citations in the journals listed in Web of Science . However, a scholar’s work may be published in journals not covered by Web of Science . It is not possible to add these to the database’s citation report and go towards the h-index. Also, Web of Science only includes citations to journal articles – no books, chapters, working papers etc.). Moreover, Web of Science ’s coverage of journals in the Social Sciences and the Humanities is relatively sparse. This is especially so for the Humanities.

Select the option "Cited Reference Search" (on top). Enter the person’s last name and first initial followed by an asterisk, e.g. Helluy S* If the person always uses a second first name include the second initial followed by an asterisk, e.g. Franklin KT* .

If other authors have the same name, it’s important that you omit their articles. You can use the check boxes to the left of each article to remove individual items that are not by the author you are searching. The “Refine Results” column on the left can also help by limiting to relevant “Organizations – Enhanced”, by “Research Areas”, by “Publication Years”.

When you've determined that all the articles in the list are by the author, S. Helluy , you're searching for click on “Create Citation Report” on the right. The h-index for S. Helluy will be displayed as well as other citation stats.

Notice the two bar charts that graph the number of items published each year and the number of citations received each year.

If you wish to see how the person's h-index has changed over a time period you can use the drop-down menus below to specify a range of years. Web of Science will then re-calculate the h-index using only those articles added for those particular years.

Contending that Hirsch's H-Index does not take into account the "age" of an article, Sidiropoulos et al. (2006) came up with a modification, i.e. the Contemporary H-Index . They argued that though some older scholars may have have been "inactive" for a long period their h-index may still be high since the h-index cannot decline. This may be considered as somewhat unfair to older, senior scholars who continue to produce (if one has published a lot and already has a high h-index it is more and more difficult to incease the index). It may also be seen as unfair to younger brilliant scholars who have had time only to publish a small number of significant articles and consequently have only a low h-index. Hirsch's h-index, it is argued, doesn't distinguish between the different productivity/citations of these different kinds of scholars. The solution of Sidiropoulos et al.  is to give weightings to articles according to the year in which they're published. For example, "for an article published during the current year, its citations account four times. For an article published 4 year ago, its citations account only one time. For an article published 6 year ago, its citations account 4/6 times, and so on. This way, an old article gradually loses its 'value', even if it still gets citations." Thus, more emphasis is given to recent articles thereby favoring the h-index of scholars who are actively publishing.

One of the easiest ways to obtain someone's contemporary h-index, or "hc-index", is to use Harzing's Publish or Perish software.

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• Last Updated: Mar 20, 2024 11:33 AM
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• Tags: altmetrics , author ID , h-index , impact factor

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Calculate Your Academic Footprint: Your H-Index

• Get Started
• Author Profiles
• Find Publications (Steps 1-2)
• Track Citations (Steps 3-5)
• Count Citations (Steps 6-10)
• Your H-Index

What is an H-Index?

The h-index captures research output based on the total number of publications and the total number of citations to those works, providing a focused snapshot of an individual’s research performance. Example: If a researcher has 15 papers, each of which has at least 15 citations, their h-index is 15.

• Comparing researchers of similar career length.  
• Comparing researchers in a similar field, subject, or Department, and who publish in the same journal categories.  
• Obtaining a focused snapshot of a researcher’s performance.

Not Useful For

• Comparing researchers from different fields, disciplines, or subjects.  
• Assessing fields, departments, and subjects where research output is typically books or conference proceedings as they are not well represented by databases providing h-indices.

1  Working Group on Bibliometrics. (2016). Measuring Research Output Through Bibliometrics. University of Waterloo. Retrieved from https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/10323/Bibliometrics%20White%20Paper%20 2016%2 0Final_March2016.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y  

2  Alakangas, S. & Warburton, J. Research impact: h-index. The University of Melbourne. Retrieved from http://unimelb.libguides.com/c.php?g=402744&p=2740739  

Calculate Manually

To manually calculate your h-index, organize articles in descending order, based on the number of times they have been cited.

In the below example, an author has 8 papers that have been cited 33, 30, 20, 15, 7, 6, 5 and 4 times. This tells us that the author's h-index is 6.

• An h-index of 6 means that this author has published at least 6 papers that have each received at least 6 citations.

More context:

• The first paper has been cited 33 times, and gives us a 1 (there is one paper that has been cited at least once).
• The second paper has been cited 30 times, and gives us a 2 (there are two papers that have been cited at least twice).
• The third paper gives us a 3 and all the way up to 6 with the sixth highest paper.
• The final two papers have no effect in this case as they have been cited less than six times (Ireland, MacDonald & Stirling, 2012).

1 Ireland, T., MacDonald, K., & Stirling, P. (2012). The h-index: What is it, how do we determine it, and how can we keep up with it? In A. Tokar, M. Beurskens, S. Keuneke, M. Mahrt, I. Peters, C. Puschmann, T. van Treeck, & K. Weller (Eds.), Science and the internet (pp. 237-247). D ü sseldorf University Press.

Calculate Using Databases

• Given Scopus  and Web of Science 's citation-tracking functionality, they can also calculate an individual’s h-index based on content in their particular databases.  
• Likewise, Google Scholar collects citations and calculates an author's h-index via the Google Scholar Citations Profile feature.

Each database may determine a different h-index for the same individual as the content in each database is unique and different. 

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Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

• Open access
• Published: 26 April 2021
• Volume 126 , pages 5489–5508, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

• Pantea Kamrani   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8880-8105 1 ,
• Isabelle Dorsch   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7391-5189 1 &
• Wolfgang G. Stock   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2697-3225 1 , 2  

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The h-index is a widely used scientometric indicator on the researcher level working with a simple combination of publication and citation counts. In this article, we pursue two goals, namely the collection of empirical data about researchers’ personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as for their academic disciplines, and on the researchers’ concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation. We worked with an online survey (including a knowledge test on the calculation of the h-index), which was finished by 1081 German university professors. We distinguished between the results for all participants, and, additionally, the results by gender, generation, and field of knowledge. We found a clear binary division between the academic knowledge fields: For the sciences and medicine the h-index is important for the researchers themselves and for their disciplines, while for the humanities and social sciences, economics, and law the h-index is considerably less important. Two fifths of the professors do not know details on the h-index or wrongly deem to know what the h-index is and failed our test. The researchers’ knowledge on the h-index is much smaller in the academic branches of the humanities and the social sciences. As the h-index is important for many researchers and as not all researchers are very knowledgeable about this author-specific indicator, it seems to be necessary to make researchers more aware of scholarly metrics literacy.

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Introduction

In 2005, Hirsch introduced his famous h-index. It combines two important measures of scientometrics, namely the publication count of a researcher (as an indicator for his or her research productivity) and the citation count of those publications (as an indicator for his or her research impact). Hirsch ( 2005 , p. 1569) defines, “A scientist has index h if h of his or her N p papers have at least h citations each and the other ( N p   –   h ) papers have <  h citations each.” If a researcher has written 100 articles, for instance, 20 of these having been cited at least 20 times and the other 80 less than that, then the researcher’s h-index will be 20 (Stock and Stock 2013 , p. 382). Following Hirsch, the h-index “gives an estimate of the importance, significance, and broad impact of a scientist’s cumulative research contribution” (Hirsch 2005 , p. 16,572). Hirsch ( 2007 ) assumed that his h-index may predict researchers’ future achievements. Looking at this in retro-perspective, Hirsch had hoped to create an “objective measure of scientific achievement” (Hirsch 2020 , p. 4) but also starts to believe that this could be the opposite. Indeed, it became a measure of scientific achievement, however a very questionable one.

Also in 2005, Hirsch derives the m-index with the researcher’s “research age” in mind. Let the number of years after a researcher’s first publication be t p . The m-index is the quotient of the researcher’s h-index and her or his research age: m p  =  h p / t p (Hirsch 2005 , p. 16,571). An m -value of 2 would mean, for example, that a researcher has reached an h-value of 20 after 10 research years. Meanwhile, the h-index is strongly wired in our scientific system. It became one of the “standard indicators” in scientific information services and can be found on many general scientific bibliographic databases. Besides, it is used in various contexts and generated a lot of research and discussions. This indicator is used or rather misused—dependent on the way of seeing—in decisions about researchers’ career paths, e.g. as part of academics’ evaluation concerning awards, funding allocations, promotion, and tenure (Ding et al. 2020 ; Dinis-Oliveira 2019 ; Haustein and Larivière 2015 ; Kelly and Jennions 2006 ). For Jappe ( 2020 , p. 13), one of the arguments for the use of the h-index in evaluation studies is its “robustness with regards to incomplete publication and citation data.” Contrary, the index is well-known for its inconsistencies, incapability for comparisons between researchers with different career stages, and missing field normalization (Costas and Bordons 2007 ; Waltman and van Eck 2012 ). There already exist various advantages and disadvantages lists on the h-index (e.g. Rousseau et al. 2018 ). And it is still questionable what the h-index underlying concept represents, due to its conflation of the two concepts’ productivity and impact resulting in one single number (Sugimoto and Larivière, 2018 ).

It is easy to identify lots of variants of the h-index concerning both, the basis of the data as well as the concrete formula of calculation. Working with the numbers of publications and their citations, there are the data based upon the leading general bibliographical information services Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, Google Scholar, and, additionally, on ResearchGate (da Silva and Dobranszki 2018 ); working with publication numbers and the number of the publications’ reads, there are data based upon Mendeley (Askeridis 2018 ). Depending of an author’s visibility on an information service (Dorsch 2017 ), we see different values for the h-indices for WoS, Scopus, and Google Scholar (Bar-Ilan 2008 ), mostly following the inequation h( R ) WoS  < h( R ) Scopus  < h( R ) Google Scholar for a given researcher R (Dorsch et al. 2018 ). Having in mind that WoS consists of many databases (Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Science Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Emerging Sources Citation Index, Book Citation Index, Conference Proceedings Citation Index, etc.) and that libraries not always provide access to all (and not to all years) it is no surprise that we will find different h-indices on WoS depending on the subscribed sources and years (Hu et al. 2020 ).

After Hirsch’s publication of the two initial formulas (i.e. the h-index and the time-adjusted m-index) many scientists felt required to produce similar, but only slightly mathematically modified formulas not leading to brand-new scientific insights (Alonso et al. 2009 ; Bornmann et al. 2008 ; Jan and Ahmad 2020 ), as there are high correlations between the values of the variants (Bornmann et al. 2011 ).

How do researchers estimate the importance of the h-index? Do they really know the concrete definition and its formula? In a survey for Springer Nature ( N  = 2734 authors of Springer Nature and Biomed Central), Penny ( 2016 , slide 22) found that 67% of the asked scientists use the h-index and further 22% are aware of it but have not used it before; however, there are 10% of respondents who do not know what the h-index is. Rousseau and Rousseau ( 2017 ) asked members of the International Association of Agricultural Economists and gathered 138 answers. Here, more than two-fifth of all questionees did not know what the h-index is (Rousseau and Rousseau 2017 , p. 481). Among Taiwanese researchers ( n  = 417) 28.78% self-reported to have heard about the h-index and fully understood the indicator, whereas 22.06% never heard about it. The remaining stated to hear about it and did not know its content or only some aspects (Chen and Lin 2018 ). For academics in Ireland ( n  = 19) “journal impact factor, h-index, and RG scores” are familiar concepts, but “the majority cannot tell how these metrics are calculated or what they represent” (Ma and Ladisch 2019 , p. 214). Likewise, the interviewed academics ( n  = 9) could name “more intricate metrics like h-index or Journal Impact Factor, [but] were barely able to explain correctly how these indicators are calculated” (Lemke et al. 2019 , p. 11). The knowledge about scientometric indicators in general “is quite heterogeneous among researchers,” Rousseau and Rousseau ( 2017 , p. 482) state. This is confirmed by further studies on the familiarity, perception or usage of research evaluation metrics in general (Aksnes and Rip 2009 ; Derrick and Gillespie 2013 ; Haddow and Hammarfelt 2019 ; Hammarfelt and Haddow 2018 ).

In a blog post, Tetzner ( 2019 ) speculates on concrete numbers of a “good” h-index for academic positions. Accordingly, an h-index between 3 and 5 is good for a new assistant professor, an index between 8 and 12 for a tenured associate professor, and, finally, an index of more than 15 for a full professor. However, these numbers are gross generalizations without a sound empirical foundation. As our data are from Germany, the question arises: What kinds of tools do German funders, universities, etc. use for research evaluation? Unfortunately, there are only few publications on this topic. For scientists at German universities, bibliometric indicators (including the h-index and the impact factor) are important or very important for scientific reputation for more than 55% of the questionees (Neufeld and Johann 2016 , p.136). Those indicators have also relevance or even great relevance concerning hiring on academic positions in the estimation of more than 40% of the respondents (Neufeld and Johann 2016 , p.129). In a ranking of aspects of reputation of medical scientists, the h-index takes rank 7 (with a mean value of 3.4 with 5 being the best one) out of 17 evaluation criteria. Top-ranked indicators are the reputation of the journals of the scientists’ publications (4.1), the scientists’ citations (4.0), and their publication amount (3.7) (Krempkow et al. 2011 , p. 37). For hiring of psychology professors in Germany, the h-index had factual relevance for the tenure decision with a mean value of 3.64 (on a six-point scale) and ranks on position 12 out of more than 40 criteria for professorship (Abele-Brehm and Bühner 2016 ). Here, the number of peer-reviewed publications is top-ranked (mean value of 5.11). Obviously, these few studies highlight that the h-index indeed has relevance for research evaluation in Germany next to publication and citation numbers.

What is still a research desideratum is an in-depth description of researchers’ personal estimations on the h-index and an analysis of possible differences concerning researchers’ generation, their gender, and the discipline.

What is about the researchers’ state of knowledge on the h-index? Of course, we may ask, “What’s your knowledge on the h-index? Estimate on a scale from 1 to 5!” But personal estimations are subjective and do not substitute a test of knowledge (Kruger and Dunning 1999 ). Knowledge tests on researchers’ state of knowledge concerning the h-index are—to our best knowledge—a research desideratum, too.

In this article, we pursue two goals, namely on the one hand—similar to Buela-Casal and Zych ( 2012 ) on the impact factor—the collection of data about researchers’ personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as their discipline, and on the other hand data on the researchers’ concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation. In short, these are our research questions:

RQ1: How do researchers estimate the importance of the h-index?

RQ2: What is the researchers’ knowledge on the h-index?

In order to answer RQ1, we asked researchers on their personal opinions; to answer RQ2, we additionally performed a test of their knowledge.

Online survey

Online-survey-based questionnaires provide a means of generating quantitative data. Furthermore, they ensure anonymity, and thus, a high degree of unbiasedness to bare personal information, preferences, and own knowledge. Therefore, we decided to work with an online survey. As we live and work in Germany, we know well the German academic landscape and thus restricted ourselves to professors working at a German university. We have focused on university professors as sample population (and skipped other academic staff in universities and also professors at universities of applied sciences), because we wanted to concentrate on persons who have (1) an established career path (in contrast to other academic staff) and (2) are to a high extent oriented towards publishing their research results (in contrast to professors at universities of applied science, formerly called Fachhochschulen , i.e. polytechnics, who are primarily oriented towards practice).

The online questionnaire (see Appendix 1 ) in German language contained three different sections. In Sect.  1 , we asked for personal data (gender, age, academic discipline, and university). Section  2 is on the professors’ personal estimations of the importance of publications, citations, their visibility on WoS, Scopus, and Google Scholar, the h-index on the three platforms, the importance of the h-index in their academic discipline, and, finally, their preferences concerning h-index or m-index. We chose those three information services as they are the most prominent general scientific bibliographic information services (Linde and Stock 2011 , p. 237) and all three present their specific h-index in a clearly visible way. Section  3 includes the knowledge test on the h-index and a question concerning the m-index.

In this article, we report on all aspects in relation with the h-index (for other aspects, see Kamrani et al. 2020 ). For the estimations, we used a 5-point Likert scale (from 1: very important via 3: neutral to 5: very unimportant) (Likert 1932 ). It was possible for all estimations to click also on “prefer not to say.” The test in Sect.  3 was composed of two questions, namely a subjective estimation of the own knowledge on the h-index and an objective knowledge test on this knowledge with a multiple-choice test (items: one correct answer, four incorrect ones as distractors, and the option “I’m not sure”). Those were the five items (the third one being counted as correct):

h is the quotient of the number of citations of journal articles in a reference period and the number of published journal articles in the same period;

h is the quotient of the general number of citations of articles (in a period of three years) and the number of citations of a researcher’s articles (in the same three years);

h is the number of articles by a researcher, which were cited h times at minimum;

h is the number of all citations concerning the h-index, thereof subtracted h 2 ;

h is the quotient of the number of citations of a research publication and the age of this publication.

A selected-response format for the objective knowledge test was chosen since it is recommended as the best choice for measuring knowledge (Haladyna and Rodriguez 2013 ). For the development of the knowledge test items we predominantly followed the 22 recommendations given by Haladyna and Rodriguez ( 2013 , in section II). Using a three-option multiple-choice should be superior to the four- or five-option for several reasons. However, we decided to use five options because our test only contained one question. The “I’m not sure” selection was added for the reason that our test is not a typical (classroom) assessment test. We, therefore, did not want to force an answer, for example through guessing, but rather wanted to know if participants do not know the correct answer. Creating reliable distractors can be seen as the most difficult part of the test development. Furthermore, validation is a crucial task. Here we tested and validated the question to the best of our knowledge.

As no ethical review board was involved in our research, we had to determine the ethical harmlessness of the research project ourselves and followed suggestions for ethical research applying online surveys such as consent, risk, privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, and autonomy (Buchanan and Hvizdak 2009 ). We found the e-mail addresses of the participants in a publicly accessible source (a handbook on all German faculty members, Deutscher Hochschulverband 2020 ); the participation was basically voluntary, and the participants knew that their answers became stored. At no time, participants became individually identifiable through our data collection or preparation as we strictly anonymized all questionnaires.

Participants

The addresses of the university professors were randomly extracted from the German Hochschullehrer-Verzeichnis (Deutscher Hochschulverband 2020 ). So, our procedure was non-probability sampling, more precisely convenience sampling in combination with volunteer sampling (Vehovar et al. 2016 ). Starting with volume 1 of the 2020 edition of the handbook, we randomly picked up entries and wrote the e-mails addresses down. The link to the questionnaire was distributed to every single professor by the found e-mail addresses; to host the survey we applied UmfrageOnline . To strengthen the power of the statistical analysis we predefined a minimum of 1000 usable questionnaires. The power tables provided by Cohen ( 1988 ) have a maximum of n  = 1000 participants. Therefore, we chose this value of the sample size to ensure statistically significant results, also for smaller subsets as single genders, generations, and disciplines (Cohen 1992 ). We started the mailing in June 2019 and stopped it in March 2020, when we had response of more than 1000 valid questionnaires. All in all we contacted 5722 professors by mail and arrived at 1081 completed questionnaires, which corresponds to a response rate of 18.9%.

Table 1 shows a comparison between our sample of German professors at universities with the population as one can find it in the official statistics (Destatis 2019 ). There are only minor differences concerning the gender distribution and also few divergences concerning most disciplines; however, Table 1 exhibits two huge differences. In our sample, we find more (natural) scientists than in the official statistics and less scholars in the humanities and the social sciences.

In our analysis, we distinguished always between the results for all participants, and, additionally, the results by gender (Geraci et al. 2015 ), generation (Fietkiewicz et al. 2016 ), and the field of knowledge (Hirsch and Buela-Casal 2014 ). We differentiated two genders (men, women) (note the questionnaire also provided the options “diverse” and “prefer not to say,” which were excluded from further calculations concerning gender), four generations: Generation Y (born after 1980), Generation X (born between 1960 and 1980), Baby Boomers (born after 1946 and before 1960), Silent Generation (born before 1946), and six academic disciplines: (1) geosciences, environmental sciences, agriculture, forestry, (2) humanities, social sciences, (3) sciences (including mathematics), (4) medicine, (5) law, and (6) economics. This division of knowledge fields is in line with the faculty structure of many German universities. As some participants answered some questions with “prefer not to say” (which was excluded from further calculations), the sum of all answers is not always 1081.

As our Likert scale is an ordinal scale, we calculated in each case the median as well as the interquartile range (IQR). For the analysis of significant differences we applied the Mann–Whitney u-test (Mann and Whitney 1947 ) (for the two values of gender) and the Kruskall–Wallis h-test (Kruskal and Wallis 1952 ) (for more than two values as the generations and academic disciplines). The data on the researchers’ knowledge on the h-index are on a nominal scale, so we calculated relative frequencies for three values (1: researcher knows the h-index in her/his self-estimation and passed the test; 2: researcher does not know the h-index in her/his self-estimation; 3: researcher knows the h-index in her/his self-estimation and failed the test) and used chi-squared test (Pearson 1900 ) for the analysis of differences between gender, knowledge area, and generation. We distinguish between three levels of statistical significance, namely *: p  ≤ 0.05 (significant), **: p  ≤ 0.01 (very significant), and ***: p  ≤ 0.001 (extremely significant); however, one has to interpret such values always with caution (Amrhein et al. 2019 ). All calculations were done with the help of SPSS (see a sketch of the data analysis plan in Appendix 2 ).

Researchers’ estimations of the h-index

How do researchers estimate the importance of the h-index for their academic discipline? And how important is the h-index (on WoS, Scopus, and Google Scholar) for themselves? In this paragraph, we will answer our research question 1.

Table 2 shows the different researcher estimations of the importance of the h-index concerning their discipline. While for all participants the h-index is “important” (2) for their academic field (median 2, IQA 1), there are massive and extremely significant differences between the single disciplines. For the sciences, medicine, and geosciences (including environmental sciences, agriculture, and forestry) the h-index is much more important (median 2, IQA 1) than for economics (median 3, IQA 1), humanities and social sciences (median 4, IQA 2), and law (median 5, IQA 0). The most votes for “very important” come from medicine (29.1%), the least from the humanities and social sciences (1.0%) as well as from law (0.0%). Conversely, the most very negative estimations (5: “very unimportant”) can be found among lawyers (78.6%) and scholars from the humanities and social sciences (30.4%). There is a clear cut between sciences (including geosciences, etc., and medicine) on one hand and humanities and all social sciences (including law and economics) on the other hand—with a stark importance of the h-index for the first-mentioned disciplines and a weak importance of the h-index for the latter.

In Tables 3 , 4 and 5 we find the results for the researchers’ estimations of the importance of their h-index on WoS (Table 3 ), Scopus (Table 4 ), and Google Scholar (Table 5 ). For all participants, the h-index on WoS is the most important one (median 2; however, with a wide dispersion of IQR 3), leaving Scopus and Google Scholar behind it (median 3, IQR 2 for both services). For all three bibliographic information services, the estimations of men and women do not differ in the statistical picture. For scientists (including geoscientists, etc.), a high h-index on WoS and Scopus is important (median 2); interestingly, economists join scientists when it comes to the importance of the h-index on Google Scholar (all three disciplines having a median of 2). For scholars from humanities and social sciences, the h-indices on all three services are unimportant (median 4), for lawyers they are even very unimportant (median 5). For researchers in the area of medicine there is a decisive ranking: most important is their h-index on WoS (median 2, IQR 2, and 41.5% votes for “very important”), followed by Scopus (median 2, IQA 1, but only 18.4% votes for “very important”), and, finally, Google Scholar (median 3, IQR 1, and the modus also equals 3, “neutral”). For economists, the highest share of (1)-votes (“very important”) is found for Google Scholar (29.9%) in contrast to the fee-based services WoS (19.7%) and Scopus (12.2%).

Similar to the results of the knowledge areas, there is also a clear result concerning the generations. The older a researcher, the less important is his or her h-index for him- or herself. We see a declining number of (1)-votes in all three information services, and a median moving over the generations from 2 to 3 (WoS), 2 to 4 (Scopus), and 2 to 3 (Google Scholar). The youngest generation has a preference for the h-index on Google Scholar ((1)-votes: 34.9%) over the h-indices on WoS ((1)-votes: 25.9%) and Scopus ((1)-votes: 19.8%).

A very interesting result of our study are the impressive differences of the importance estimations of the h-index by discipline (Fig.  1 ). With three tiny exceptions, the estimations for the general importance and the importance of the h-indices on WoS, Scopus, and Google Scholar are consistent inside each scientific disciplines. For the natural sciences, geosciences etc., and medicine, the h-index is important (median 2), for economics, it is neutral (median 3), for the humanities and social sciences it is unimportant (median 4), and, finally, for law this index is even very unimportant (median 5).

Researchers’ estimations of the h-index by discipline (medians). N  = 1001 (general importance), N  = 961 (WoS), N  = 946 (Scopus), N  = 966 (Google Scholar); Scale: (1) very important, (2) important, (3) neutral, (4) unimportant, (5) very unimportant

We do not want to withhold a by-result on the estimation on a modification of the h-index by the time-adjusted m-index. 567 participants made a decision: for 50.8% of them the h-index is the better one, 49.2% prefer the m-index. More women (61.1%) than men (47.3%) choose the m-index over the original h-index. All academic disciplines except one prefer the m-index; scientists are the exception (only 42.8% approval for the m-index). For members of Generation Y, Baby Boomers, and Silent Generation the m-index is the preferable index; Generation X prefers mainly (54.3%) the h-index. Inside the youngest generation, Generation Y (being discriminated by the h-index), the majority of researchers (65.5%) likes the m-index more than the h-index.

Researchers’ state of knowledge on the h-index

Answering our research question 2, the overall result is presented in Fig.  2 . This is a combination of three questions, as we initially asked the researchers regarding their personal estimations of their general familiarity (Appendix 1 , Q10) and calculation knowledge (Q13) on the h-index. Only participants who confirmed that they have knowledge on the indicators’ calculation (Q10 and Q13) made the knowledge test (Q14). About three fifths of the professors know the h-index in their self-estimations and passed the test, one third of all answering participants does not know the h-index following their self-estimations, and, finally, 7.2% wrongly estimated their knowledge on the h-index, as they failed the test but meant to know it.

Researchers’ state of knowledge on the h-index: The basic distribution. N  = 1017

In contrast to many of our results concerning the researchers’ estimation of the importance of the h-index we see differences in the knowledge on the h-index by gender (Table 6 ). Only 41.6% of the women have justified knowledge (men: 64.6%), 50.0% do not know the definition or the formula of the h-index (men: 28.7%), and 8.3% wrongly estimate their knowledge as sufficient (men: 6.9%). However, these differences are statistically not significant.

In the sciences (incl. geosciences, etc.) and in medicine, more than 70% of the participants do know how to calculate the h-index. Scientists have the highest level of knowledge on the h-index (79.1% passed the knowledge test). Participants from the humanities and social sciences (21.1%) as well as from law (7.1%) exhibit the lowest states of knowledge concerning the h-index. With a share of 48.3%, economists take a middle position between the two main groups of researchers; however, there are 13.8% of economists who wrongly overestimate their knowledge state.

We found a clear result concerning the generations: the older the researcher the less is the knowledge on the h-index. While 62.9% of the Generation X know the calculation of the h-index, only 53.2% of the Baby Boomers possess this knowledge. The differences in the states of the researchers’ knowledge on the h-index within the knowledge areas and generations are extremely significant each.

Main results

Our main results are on the researchers’ estimations of the h-index and their state of knowledge on this scientometric indicator. We found a clear binary division between the academic knowledge fields: For the sciences (including geosciences, agriculture, etc.) and medicine the h-index is important for the researchers themselves and for their disciplines, while for the humanities and social sciences, economics, and law the h-index is considerably less important. For the respondents from the sciences and medicine, the h-index on WoS is most important, followed by the h-index of Google Scholar and Scopus. Surprisingly, for economists Google Scholar’s h-index is very attractive. We did not find significant differences between the estimations of the importance of the h-index between men and women; however, there are differences concerning the generations: the older the participants the less important they estimate the importance of the h-index.

Probably, for older professors the h-index has not the same significance as for their younger colleagues, as they are not so much in need to plan their further career or to apply for new research projects. On average, for researchers aged 60 and more, their productivity declines in contrast to younger colleagues (Kyvik 1990 ). And perhaps some of them simply do not know the existence of more recent services and of new scientometric indicators. Younger researchers are more tolerant of novelty in their work (Packalen and Bhattachrya 2015 ), and such novelty includes new information services (as Scopus and Google Scholar) as well as new indicators (as the h-index). It is known that young researchers rely heavily on search engines like Google (Rowlands et al. 2008 ), which partly may explain the high values for Google Scholar especially from Generation Y. Furthermore, the increasing publication pressure and the h-index utilization for decisions about early career researchers’ work-related paths thus also impact the importance of the indicator for those young professors (Farlin and Majewski 2013 ).

All in all, two fifths of the professors do not know the concrete calculation of the h-index or—which is rather scary—wrongly deem to know what the h-index is and failed our simple knowledge test. The women do even worse, as only about two fifths really know what the h-index is and how it is defined and calculated, but we should have in mind that this gender difference is statistically not significant. The older the researcher, the higher is the share of participants who do not know the definition and calculation of the h-index. The researchers’ knowledge on the h-index is much smaller in the academic disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences.

The h-index in the academic areas

Especially the obvious differences between the academic areas demand further explanation. Participants from the natural sciences and from medicine estimate the importance of the h-index as “important” or even “very important,” and they know details on this indicator to a high extend. The participants from the humanities, the social sciences, economics, and law are quite different. They estimate the h-index’ importance as “neutral,” “unimportant,” or even as “very unimportant,” and the share of researchers with profound knowledge on the h-index is quite low. Haddow and Hammarfelt ( 2019 ) also report a lower use of the h-index within these fields. Similar to our study, especially researchers in the field of law ( n  = 24) did not make use of the h-index. All researchers publish and all cite, too. There are differences in their publication channels, as scientists publish mostly in journals and researchers from the humanities publish in monographs and sometimes also in journals (Kulczycki et al. 2018 ), but this may not explain the differences concerning the importance of and the knowledge state on the h-index. Furthermore, more information on how such researchers’ h-index perceptions through different disciplines comply with the h-index (mis)usage for research evaluation within those disciplines would add another dimension to this topic.

The indeed very large general information services WoS and Scopus are, compared to personal literature lists of researchers, quite incomplete (Hilbert et al. 2015 ). There is also a pronounced unequal coverage of certain disciplines (Mongeon and Paul-Hus 2016 ) and many languages (except English) (Vera-Baceta et al. 2019 ). Perhaps these facts, in particular, prevent representatives of the disadvantaged disciplines and languages (including German—and we asked German professors) from a high estimation of the relevance of their h-index as important on these platforms. Then, however, the rejection of the h-index of Google Scholar, which can also be seen, is surprising, because this information service is by far the most complete (Martin-Martin et al. 2018 ). However, economists are very well informed here, as they—as the only academic representatives—highly value their h-index at Google Scholar. On the other hand, the use of Google Scholar for research evaluation is discussed in general. Although its coverage is usually broader than those provided by more controlled databases and steadily expanding its collection, there exist widely known issues, for example, its low accuracy (Halevi et al. 2017 ). Depending on a researcher’s own opinion on this topic, this could be a reason for seeing no importance in the h-index provided by Google Scholar as well.

Another attempt for an explanation may be the different cultures in the different research areas. For Kagan ( 2009 , p. 4), natural scientists see their main interest in explanation and prediction, while for humanists it is understanding (following Snow 1959 and Dilthey 1895 , p. 10). The h-index is called an indicator allowing explanation and prediction of scientific achievement (Hirsch 2007 ); it is typical for the culture of natural sciences. Researchers from the natural science and from medicine are accustomed to numbers, while humanists seldom work quantitatively. In the humanities, other indicators such as book reviews and the quality of book publishers are components for their research evaluation; however, such aspects are not reflected by the h-index. And if humanities scholars are never asked for their h-index, why should they know or use it?

Following Kagan ( 2009 , p. 5) a second time, humanists exhibit only minimal dependence on outside support and natural scientists are highly dependent on external sources of financing. The h-index can work as an argument for the allocation of outside support. So for natural scientists the h-index is a very common fabric and they need it for their academic survival; humanists are not as familiar with numerical indicators and for them the h-index is not so much-needed as for their colleagues from the science and medicine faculties. However, this dichotomous classification of research and researchers may be an oversimplifying solution (Kowalski and Mrdjenovich 2016 ) and there is a trend in consulting and using such research evaluation indicators in the humanities and social sciences, too. For preparing a satisfying theory of researchers’ behavior concerning the h-index (or, in general, concerning scientometric indicators)—also in dependence on their background in an academic field—more research is needed.

Limitations, outlook, and recommendations

A clear limitation of the study is our studied population, namely university professors from Germany. Of course, researchers in other countries should be included in further studies. It seems necessary to broaden the view towards all researchers and all occupational areas, too, including, for instance, also lecturers in polytechnics and researchers in private companies. Another limitation is the consideration of only three h-indices (of WoS, Scopus, and Google Scholar). As there are other databases for the calculation of an h-index (e.g., ResearchGate) the study should be broadened to all variants of the h-index.

Another interesting research question may be: Are there any correlations between the estimations of the importance of the h-index or the researcher’s knowledge on the h-index and the researcher’s own h-index? Does a researcher with a high h-index on, for instance, WoS, estimate the importance of this indicator higher than a researcher with a low h-index? Hirsch ( 2020 ) speculates that people with high h-indexes are more likely to think that this indicator is important. A more in-depth analysis on the self-estimation of researchers’ h-index knowledge might also consider the Dunning-Kruger effect, showing certain people can be wrongly confident about their limited knowledge within a domain and not having the ability to realize this (Kruger and Dunning 1999 ).

As the h-index has still an important impact on the evaluation of scientists and as not all researchers are very knowledgeable about this author-specific research indicator, it seems to be a good idea to strengthen their knowledge in the broader area of “metric-wiseness” (Rousseau et al. 2018 ; Rousseau and Rousseau 2015 ). With a stronger focus on educating researchers and research support staff in terms of the application and interpretation of metrics as well as to reduce misuse of indicators, Haustein ( 2018 ) speaks about better (scholarly) “metrics literacies.” Following Hammarfelt and Haddow ( 2018 ), we should further discuss possible effects of indicators within the “metrics culture.” Likewise, this also applies to all knowledgeable researchers as well as research evaluators who also may or may not be researchers by themselves. Here, the focus rather lies to raise awareness for metrics literacies and to foster fair research evaluation practices not incorporating any kind of misuse. This leads directly to a research gap in scientometrics. Further research on concrete data about the level of researchers’ knowledge not only concerning the h-index, but also on other indicators such as WoS’s impact factor, Google’s i-10 index, Scopus’ CiteScore, the source normalized impact per paper (SNIP), etc., also in a comparative perspective would draw a more comprehensive picture on the current indicator knowledge. All the meanwhile “classical” scientometric indicators are based upon publication and citation measures (Stock 2001 ). Alternative indicators are available today, which are based upon social media metrics, called “altmetrics” (Meschede and Siebenlist 2018 ; Thelwall et al. 2013 ). How do researchers estimate the importance of these alternative indicators and do they know their definitions and their formulae of calculation? First insights on this give Lemke et al. ( 2019 ), also in regard to researchers’ personal preferences and concerns.

Following Hirsch ( 2020 ), the h-index is by no means a valid indicator of research quality; however, it is very common especially in the sciences and medicine. Probably, it is a convenient indicator for some researchers who want to avoid the hassle of laborious and time-consuming reviewing and scrutinizing other researchers’ œuvre. Apart from its convenience and popularity, and seen from an ethical perspective, one should consider what significance a single metric should have and how we—in general—want to further shape the future of research evaluation.

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Appendix 1: List of all questions (translated from German)

Appendix 2: Data analysis plan (intuitive sketch)

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Kamrani, P., Dorsch, I. & Stock, W.G. Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?. Scientometrics 126 , 5489–5508 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03968-1

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Measuring Research Impact and Quality

• Times cited counts
• h-index for resesarchers-definition

h-index for journals

H-index for institutions, computing your own h-index, ways to increase your h-index, limitations of the h-index, variations of the h-index.

• Using Scopus to find a researcher's h-index
• Additional resources for finding a researcher's h-index
• Journal Impact Factor & other journal rankings
• Journal acceptance rates
• Altmetrics This link opens in a new window
• Impact by discipline
• Researcher Profiles

h-index for researchers-definition

• The h-index is a measure used to indicate the impact and productivity of a researcher based on how often his/her publications have been cited.
• The physicist, Jorge E. Hirsch, provides the following definition for the h-index:  A scientist has index h if  h of his/her N p  papers have at least h citations each, and the other (N p  − h) papers have no more than h citations each. (Hirsch, JE (15 November 2005) PNAS 102 (46) 16569-16572)
• The h -index is based on the highest number of papers written by the author that have had at least the same number of citations.
• A researcher with an h-index of 6 has published six papers that have been cited at least six times by other scholars.  This researcher may have published more than six papers, but only six of them have been cited six or more times. 

Whether or not a h-index is considered strong, weak or average depends on the researcher's field of study and how long they have been active.  The h-index of an individual should be considered in the context of the h-indices of equivalent researchers in the same field of study.

Definition :  The h-index of a publication is the largest number h such that at least h articles in that publication were cited at least h times each. For example, a journal with a h-index of 20 has published 20 articles that have been cited 20 or more times.

Available from:

• SJR (Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

Whether or not a h-index is considered strong, weak or average depends on the discipline the journal covers and how long it has published. The h-index of a journal should be considered in the context of the h-indices of other journals in similar disciplines.

Definition :  The h-index of an institution is the largest number h such that at least h articles published by researchers at the institution were cited at least h times each. For example, if an institution has a h-index of 200 it's researchers have published 200 articles that have been cited 200 or more times.

Available from: exaly

In a spreadsheet, list the number of times each of your publications has been cited by other scholars. 

Sort the spreadsheet in descending order by the number of  times each publication is cited.  Then start counting down until the article number is equal to or not greater than the times cited.

Article                   Times Cited

1                              50          

2                              15          

3                              12

4                              10

5                              8

6                              7              == =>h index is 6

7                              5             

8                              1

How to successfully boost your h-index (enago academy, 2019)

Glänzel, Wolfgang On the Opportunities and Limitations of the H-index. , 2006

• h -index based upon data from the last 5 years
•  i-10 index is the number of articles by an author that have at least ten citations. 
•  i-10 index was created by Google Scholar .
• Used to compare researchers with different lengths of publication history
• m-index =   ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­___________ h-index _______________                      # of years since author’s 1 st publication

Using Scopus to find an researcher's h-index

Additional resources for finding a researcher's h-index.

Web of Science Core Collection or Web of Science All Databases

• Perform an author search
• Create a citation report for that author.
• The h-index will be listed in the report.

Set up your author profile in the following three resources.  Each resource will compute your h-index.  Your h-index may vary since each of these sites collects data from different resources.

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What is a good h-index?

This article discusses what’s considered a good h-index. If you’re interested in a tool that helps you when improving your h-index, check out Avidnote which is a useful app to help you write better research notes.

It is not an easy task to quantitatively determine what makes one scholar more prolific than another, or compare between the bodies of work of different researchers. Although comparisons between researchers is difficult, it is nonetheless important when allocating research grants or deciding on who to recruit or to promote to an academic position. One way to determine the level of output of a researcher is by using the h-index. Since it was introduced many years ago, it has become widely used because of its unique properties.

What is the h-index? The h-index is a measure of a researcher’s productivity (number of publications) and impact (number of citations generated by the publications). It takes into account both the quantity of work, in terms of how many publications the author has generated, as well as the “ quality ” of those papers, in terms of how many citations it has obtained (assuming that accumulating a lot of citations is the mark of quality, which is not necessarily true, but in lack of other metrics, it’s used as a proxy to measure quality).

The index was introduced in 2005 by Jorge Hirsh, a physicist at the University of San Diego, California in a paper titled “An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output.” Hirsh defined the index as “the number of papers with citation number ≥h [the ranking position where the number of publications is greater than or equal to the number of citations]” and saw it as a “useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher.”

According to Hirsh

“The publication record of an individual and the citation record clearly are data that contain useful information. That information includes the number (Np) of papers published over n years, the number of citations (Nc j ) for each paper (j), the journals where the papers were published, their impact parameter, etc. This large amount of information will be evaluated with different criteria by different people. Here, I would like to propose a single number, the ‘‘h index,’’ as a particularly simple and useful way to characterize the scientific output of a researcher. A scientist has index h if h of his or her Np papers have at least h citations each and the other (Np – h) papers have ≤h citations each.”

He further notes that

“For the few scientists who earn a Nobel prize, the impact and relevance of their research is unquestionable. Among the rest of us, how does one quantify the cumulative impact and relevance of an individual’s scientific research output? In a world of limited resources, such quantification (even if potentially distasteful) is often needed for evaluation and comparison purposes (e.g., for university faculty recruitment and advancement, award of grants, etc.).”

Practical example

Consider a scientist that has published 5 papers with the following citations:

• Publication 1 = 11 citations • Publication 2 = 9 citations • Publication 3 = 7 citations • Publication 4 = 4 citations • Publication 5 = 3 citations

In the above example, the scientist’s h index is = 4 [the ranking position where the number of publications is equal to the number of citations]. Hence, paper 5 [or the fifth position in the ranking] is not relevant since the number of citations [3] is not greater than or equal to h[5]. Note that the citations are always arranged in descending numerical order. Thus, a scholar with 9 publications that have been cited at least 9 times each has an h-index of 9.

Because of its simplicity and logic, the h-index has become increasingly popular over the years. It is now a quick and accessible metric that researchers can use to track their scientific progress or impact. Different databases (e.g., Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, etc) have specific ways of calculating the h-index. Determining a good h-index

Due to some other variables, it is not possible to precisely determine what constitutes a standard or uniform good index. This is because publication and citation dynamics vary across the various fields of learning. There are also similar variations among funding and recruitment organizations that may consider factors like educational level, position of the applicant as well as type and size of the research project to be funded.

So what is a “good” h-index?

Here, it could be useful to refer to a study (Am J Clin Pathol 2019;151:286-91) that found that, on average, assistant professors have an h-index of 2-5, associate professors 6-10, and full professors 12-24. The statistical variance in the data set was quite large so the averages should be taken with a grain of salt. The same study found that if you are aiming for a Nobel Prize, your h-index needs to be at least 35 and preferably much closer to 70.

Note that the above figures are not fixed and conditions can differ significantly according to discipline (as noted above). For instance, there are cases where full professors, faculty deans, and vice-chancellors have very low h-index scores, while brilliant young researchers still pursuing PhDs have scores of between 10 and 15. The figures will also vary significantly depending on the research area.

One rule that is widely accepted, however, is that an h-index score should at least be equal to the number of years a scholar has put into his or her work. This rule was prescribed by Hirsch who recommended an h-index of at least 20 after working for the same number of years. One notable observation from Hirsch’s paper is that accomplished scientists usually accumulate high h-index scores. This is indicated by the statistics in his 2005 paper which show that 84% of Nobel laureates in physics had an index score of at least 30.

Limitations of the h-index

One significant pro of the h-index is its combination of productivity (number of papers published) and impact (number of citations) to derive the score. The implication of this is that neither several publications with a few (or no) citations nor a few heavily cited publications will lead to a high h-index. However, despite its strengths, the index has a number of weaknesses or limitations. Some of them are enumerated below.

• Due to incomplete coverage or varying degrees of coverage of a scholar’s works by the different bibliometric databases, the scholar’s h-index can vary significantly from one database to another. For example, some databases do not provide sufficient coverage for publications in foreign languages. • It fails to consider the number of authors of a particular publication. The argument here is that a paper with 70 citations written by one author should attract extra plaudits than one with the same number of citations written by say, 7 authors. • Because of its direct relationship with time, the index tends to favour writers who are at the middle or terminal stages of their working life. For instance, assuming Albert Einstein died in early 1906, he would still have been regarded as a very influential physicist but his h-index would have been lower (maybe 4 or 5). He presently has an h-index of 119, according to Google scholar. • Authors working in fields characterized by fast rates of publication, heavily cited/referenced papers, and multiple authorship tend to be more favoured.

• Review articles often exert a more significant impact on the h-index than original papers because they are usually cited more frequently.

Due to the limitations of the h-index, some variations have emerged over the years. These include m-index, contemporary h-index, and i10 index. However, these other measures are not as widely applied as Hirsch’s index.

Even with its limitations and skepticism amongst some scholars, metrics like the h-index remain important considerations among decision-makers that determine things like awarding research grants and recruiting staff. The h-index has continued to expand in usage since it was introduced by Jorge Hirsch in 2005. However, it is impossible to determine what constitutes a good h-index due to a number of factors such as differing publication and citation conditions across the various fields of knowledge, among others.

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The h-Index: Understanding its predictors, significance, and criticism

Himel mondal.

1 Department of Physiology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Deoghar, Jharkhand, India

Kishore Kumar Deepak

2 Centre for Biomedical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India

Manisha Gupta

3 Department of Physiology, Santosh Medical College, Santosh University, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India

Raman Kumar

4 National President and Founder, Academy of Family Physicians of India, India

The h-index is an author-level scientometric index used to gauge the significance of a researcher's work. The index is determined by taking the number of publications and the number of times these publications have been cited by others. Although it is widely used in academia, many authors find its calculation confusing. There are websites such as Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science (WOS), and Vidwan that provide the h-index of an author. As this metrics is frequently used by recruiting agency and grant approving authority to see the output of researchers, the authors need to know in-depth about it. In this article, we describe both the manual calculation method of the h-index and the details of websites that provide an automated calculation. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the h-index and the factors that determine the h-index of an author. Overall, this article serves as a comprehensive guide for novice authors seeking to understand the h-index and its significance in academia.

Introduction

The h-index is a commonly used metric to measure the productivity and impact of academic researchers. It was first introduced in 2005, and since then, the h-index has become an important tool for evaluating researchers, departments, and institutions.[ 1 ] The calculation of the h-index is relatively simple, yet it confuses novice authors. There are several websites where researchers can find their h-index autocalculated. While the h-index has several advantages, such as providing a simple and objective measure of a researcher's impact, there are also some limitations to its use. For example, the h-index does not take into account the quality of the publications or the context in which they were cited.[ 2 ]

In this study, we will explore the calculation of the h-index, the websites where it is available, and the advantages and disadvantages of using this metric, and it is predictors that increase the h-index of an author. By examining the strengths and weaknesses of the h-index, we hope to provide a comprehensive understanding of this important tool for evaluating scientific impact.

Calculation Method

The h-index is defined as the “highest number h, such that the individual has published h papers that have each been cited at least h times.”[ 3 ] For example, if an author has 10 papers and seven of those have been cited at least seven times each, then the h-index for that individual is 7. To make it more easy, we are presenting an example of how an author can calculate the h-index manually [ Table 1 ]. To calculate the h-index, we first sort the papers in descending order based on their citation counts. Then, we count the number of papers that have at least as many citations as their position in the list. The table footnote describes situations where the h-index would be 8 or 9 in future.

h-index of an author who has 10 papers

The h-index of the author is 7. A total of seven of the papers got at least seven citations each. Eight of the papers have not received at least eight citations. The author's h-index will be 8 when “Paper 8” gets additional three or more than three citations. The author's h-index will be 9 when “Paper 7” gets additional one or more than one, “Paper 8” gets additional four or more than four, and “Paper 9” gets additional five or more than five citations

Where to Get h-Index?

There are databases that provide the h-index information for authors for free. Some of the most commonly used websites that calculate the h-index of an author are listed as follows. The website titles, links, and services that are freely available are shown in Table 2 .

Websites that calculate the h-index of an author

WOS: Web of Science

Google Scholar

Perhaps it is the most commonly used website by scholars around the world. Google Scholar provides h-index information for authors based on the citations of their papers as indexed by Google Scholar.[ 4 ] It is a free service provided by Google Scholar, and any researcher can open an account. However, if the researcher has an institutional email address, then the account can be made public after verifying the email. The authors can observe the year-wise citation count for a quick idea about the trend of citations over the years. An example is shown in Figure 1 a.

Examples of h-index of an author found in (a) Google Scholar, (b) Scopus, (c) Web of Science, and (d) ResearchGate showing discordance in h-index

This database, provided by Elsevier, is another popular citation database that provides h-index information and other metrics, such as total citations and year-wise citations.[ 5 ] Researchers can search for any name from the home page by clicking on “View your author profile” and searching by surname and name. However, we suggest creating a free account to track your own articles and citations. An example is shown in Figure 1 b. From the same homepage, the authors can also check the articles published and citation count of any journal by clicking on “View journal rankings.”

Web of Science

This database is maintained by Clarivate, and it is one of the most widely used citation databases. Previously, Researcher ID was provided by Thomson Reuters.[ 6 ] Now, the Researcher ID is provided by Web of Science (WOS) that is maintained by the parent company Clarivate. The creation of an account is free in WOS. After creating the account, an author can view own details and also search for other researchers in the database. In the profile, WOS provides h-index information and other metrics, such as total citations, number of WOS-indexed articles, and number of citing articles. An example is shown in Figure 1 c.

ResearchGate

This social networking site for researchers provides h-index information and other metrics, such as total citations and year-wise citations. To get the h-index in ResearchGate, one needs to create an account.[ 7 ] Only published authors or invitee can create an account. Although ResearchGate suggests using the institutional email address, without it authors can open an account too. The authors need to send proof of publication for the creation of an account by a noninstitutional email address. In addition, those who are already in ResearchGate can send invitation to others to open an account. After logging in, the h-index is shown along with other metrics as shown in Figure 1 d.

The Vidwan Expert Database and National Researcher's Network is a comprehensive platform designed to connect and showcase the expertise of scholars and researchers across various fields. It is a service provided by the Information and Communications Technology of Ministry of Education, India. The database is developed and maintained by the Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET). This service is not open to all authors. Any recipient of national or internal award, any postgraduate with 10 years of professional experience, postdoctoral fellow, research scholar, professor (full, associate, or assistant), senior scientist, or having equivalent reaching or research post can open an account. This website shows the h-index along with total articles, year-wise articles, type of publication, total citations, citations available from Crossref ( https://www.crossref.org ), number of coauthors, coauthor network, and Altmetric ( https://www.altmetric.com ) scores. A part of the Vidwan profile with the h-index of a researcher is shown in Figure 2 .

A part of a Vidwan profile showing the h-index and other metrics of the second author

Why h-Index Differ?

The h-index can differ between different sites. One can see her/his h-index higher in Google Scholar than in Scopus or WOS.[ 8 ]

Different databases may have different coverage and indexing policies. Some databases may include more or fewer journals, conference proceedings, or other sources of academic literature. This can affect the number of citations that are included in the h-index calculation.

Different databases may have different time lags in their citation data, meaning that citations may not be indexed at the same time or may be indexed differently based on the date of publication. This can affect the h-index calculation for a temporary period, especially if a researcher has recently published a highly cited paper that has not yet been indexed by a particular database.

In addition to the above factors, there may be errors or inconsistencies in the citation data used to calculate the h-index, which can lead to differences in the resulting h-index across different databases.

Therefore, it is important to use multiple sources of h-index information and to be aware of the potential differences between different sites. Google Scholar uses maximum sources to calculate the h-index. Hence, the h-index in Google Scholar may be the highest among the h-index provided by other databases. One question may still ponder: Which to take as the final h-index of an author? Although there is no simple answer to this question, Google Scholar may be considered the provider of the most comprehensive h-index. The impact of research is now not limited to citation in a journal article indexed by a single bibliographic database.

Advantages of h-Index

The h-index has several advantages as a measure of research productivity and impact. The h-index takes into account both the number of publications and the number of citations those publications have received. This helps to balance the impact of quantity (by number of publications) and quality of publications (by number of citations it received) on the researcher's overall research output. The h-index can be easily calculated using citation databases, such as Google Scholar. Being a free service, any author can get the h-index automatically calculated in Google Scholar. Scopus and WOS also provide their services free of charge for getting the h-index. We can use the h-index to compare the productivity and impact of researchers across different disciplines. The h-index is less affected by outliers. The h-index is less sensitive to individual highly cited papers or lowly cited papers, as it considers the total number of papers a researcher has published that have been cited a certain number of times. It provides a long-term measure of research impact, as it takes into account the entire career of the researcher rather than just a single paper or a recent burst of activity.[ 9 ]

Limitation of h-Index

Despite these advantages, the h-index is not without limitations. The h-index is criticized for favoring researchers who have been in the field for a longer period of time, as they have had more time to publish and accumulate citations. This can disadvantage early-career researchers. The h-index does not account for differences in citation practices between different fields or subfields, which can lead to unfair comparisons between researchers in different areas. The h-index relies on citation databases, which may not include all relevant citations. This can result in an inaccurate representation of a researcher's impact. However, this is common for all online calculated indices. The h-index includes citations to a researcher's own work, which can inflate the researcher's impact and may not accurately reflect their influence on the field. The h-index can be manipulated by self-citing excessively to increase the number of citations. The h-index does not take into account other important factors, such as the quality of publications, the impact of a researcher's work beyond citations, or their contributions to teaching and service.[ 10 ]

Hence, the h-index should be used in conjunction with other metrics and qualitative evaluations to get a comprehensive assessment of a researcher's productivity and impact.

Usage of h-Index in Academia

There is no thumb rule of the level of h-index for hiring professionals or promotion of faculties. However, this index can be used by the universities for comparison of impact among the candidates for hiring or promotion. In addition, universities are commonly interested in recruiting a researcher with higher publication impact as the impact would be a feather to the crown of the university. A study by Wang et al .[ 11 ] in the Department of Surgery, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, United States, found that a faculty has a median h-index of 6 at hiring, 11 during the promotion from assistant to associate professor, and 17 during the promotion from associate to full professor. In addition, Schreiber and Giustini studied 14 disciplines in North American medical schools and found that assistant professors have an h-index of 2 to 5, associate professors have 6 to 10, and full professors have an index of 12 to 24.[ 12 ] A study by Kaur from India showed that top publishing authors in the medical field from All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, and Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, have the h-index of 15 and 21, respectively.[ 13 ] Nowak et al .[ 14 ] analyzed 13 medical specialties and found that the median h-index was 19.5. There is a need for further research and reviews to get a generalizable result. Till we get that, the rule is “the more the merrier!”

Other Numbers and Indices Used in Academia

There are other author-level metrics that are used by various universities to evaluate research productivity and impact.

Some universities still use the total number of publications as a criterion for promotion. In addition, the total number of citations is also considered an indicator of research impact. This metric counts the total number of times an author's papers have been cited, regardless of the number of papers they have published. Furthermore, the average number of citations per paper for an author, which can provide insight into the overall quality and impact of their work, is sometimes considered. Table 3 shows the various other calculations and indices that are used.

Other calculations and indices (calculated from data in Table 1 )

The i10-index is another simple measure that indicates the number of papers that have received 10 citations each. It is shown in a Google Scholar profile along with the h-index of an author [ Figure 1 a].

The g-index is another metric that is not readily found calculated in the above database websites, but one can manually calculate the g-index of an author. It gives more weight to highly cited papers. It is calculated by finding the largest number of g such that the top g papers have a total of at least g 2 citations. For example, in Table 1 , the author had a g-index of 10 as cumulative citations on the 10 th paper are more than 10 2 [ Table 2 ]. If the author had a 11 th paper with even 0 citations, the g-index would be 11 (as cumulative citations are more than 11 2 ). However, if the author had a 12 th paper with 0 citations, the g-index could be 11 as cumulative citations were below 12 2 .[ 3 ]

The m-index is a metric that takes into account the h-index and years of activity of an author.[ 15 ] Its calculation is simple. For example, if the author is publishing the papers shown in Table 1 for the last 5 years, the m-value or m-index would be 1.4 (7/5) [ Table 3 ].

It is important to note that no single metric can provide a comprehensive evaluation of a researcher's productivity and impact, and these metrics should be used in combination with other qualitative evaluations. Furthermore, no index is still there in academia that is capable of judging the quality of a research paper.

Factors that Influence h-Index

Achieving a high h-index can be a long-term process that requires sustained research productivity and impact.[ 16 ] Here are some factors that have the potential to influence the h-index.

Publish in high-impact journals

Publishing in high-impact journals can help to increase the visibility and impact of one's research, leading to more citations and a higher h-index. High-impact journals are typically those with a large readership and reputation for publishing groundbreaking research. Articles published in these journals tend to be highly cited and can have a significant impact on their respective fields.[ 17 ]

Make research openly accessible

Making research freely and openly accessible can increase the visibility and impact of one's work, leading to more citations and a higher h-index. Open-access articles can reach a wider audience and potential readership, including researchers who might not have access to the article through traditional subscription-based methods. Additionally, open-access articles can be easily shared on social media platforms, blogs, and other online forums, which can increase their reach and promote their visibility.[ 18 ]

Collaborate with other researchers

Collaborating with other researchers can lead to more publications and citations, as well as exposure to new research ideas and methods. Collaboration can bring together researchers with different areas of expertise and skill sets, resulting in more comprehensive and impactful research. Collaborating with other researchers can increase the visibility of the research. Collaborators are likely to share the research with their networks, potentially increasing the readership and citations of the work.[ 19 ]

Balance quality and quantity

While the quantity of publications is important, it is more important to focus on producing high-quality research that is impactful and well-regarded in the field. Higher-quality articles are more likely to be cited by other researchers, which can further increase their impact and visibility.[ 20 ] However, the number is also important. For example, if an author has five papers with a huge 50000 citations, the h-index would be 5 only.

Stay active in the field

Attending conferences can provide opportunities to meet other researchers and learn about new research in the field. By presenting one's own research at a conference, researchers can receive feedback and ideas from other scholars, which can lead to new collaborations and research opportunities. Attending conferences also provides opportunities to network with other researchers. Delivering talks or lectures can also increase visibility and impact. Participating in scholarly discussions, such as by commenting on blogs or participating in online forums, can also increase visibility, which increases the chances of higher citations.[ 21 ]

Promote your research

Promoting research can be an effective strategy for increasing citations. There are several ways to promote research, including sharing it on social media, collaborating with other researchers, and seeking media coverage. Sharing research on social media can be an effective way to increase visibility and reach a wider audience. Researchers can share their work on their personal or professional social media accounts or on specialized platforms, such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu.[ 22 ] Seeking media coverage can also be an effective way to promote research and increase citations. Media coverage can increase the visibility of the research and attract the attention of other researchers who may be interested in citing the work. Researchers can also promote the articles on their own websites for a higher reach in the field, which lead to more citations and a higher h-index.[ 21 ]

Conduct timely research

By working on influential research and trending topics, researchers can increase the likelihood that their work will be cited by other researchers in the field. To conduct timely research, researchers need to stay up-to-date on the latest developments and emerging trends in their field. This may involve reading relevant literature, attending conferences, and collaborating with other researchers. By staying current with the latest research, researchers can identify gaps in the field and opportunities for making meaningful contributions.[ 23 ]

It is important to note that these strategies should not be used to game the system or artificially inflate one's h-index, but rather as ways to increase the impact and visibility of one's research in a genuine and sustainable way.

Institutional Level Data

The institutional h-index is not readily available in Google Scholar. However, one can manually search the total publications from the institution and citation to the published article from the institutional repository (if available) to calculate the h-index of the institution. The calculation method remains the same. Institutions that do not have their own repository can collect data from Google Scholar about publications and citations. If the institution provides an email address to the employee, and teachers or researchers verify the email address, the data can be collected from Google Scholar from the following method. The website https://scholar.google.com/citations?mauthors=aiimsdeoghar.edu.in&hl=en&view_op=search_authors is opened if the institution has the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) as aiimsdeoghar.edu.in. All the authors who verified their accounts would be shown with their papers and citations.[ 24 ] These data can be used to calculate the central tendencies of the h-index of the authors in that institution. A similar method can be used to extract data from other databases, such as Scopus, to compute the institution-level h-index.[ 25 ] Institutions may also open a user account as a researcher in Google Scholar as shown in Figure 3 and add the published “Add article manually” (after clicking the addition “+” button) to get institutional level h-index.

A profile of an institution in Google Scholar

The h-index of global institutions can also be found at https://exaly.com/institutions/citations . This website hosts data of 53,307 institutions along with their h-index. Exaly is a nonprofit initiative aimed at filling the gap of lacking an inclusive and accessible collection of academic papers and scientometric information. It is referred to as a project rather than an organization to ensure independence from commercial motives. Indian regional data are available on a website https://www.indianscience.net/list_inst.php that provides data till 2019 . This website extracted data from Dimensions ( https://www.dimensions.ai ) and Altmetric ( https://www.altmetric.com ).[ 26 ]

In conclusion, the h-index is a widely used metric for measuring the productivity and impact of researchers. While it has some limitations, such as its inability to capture the quality of publications and the potential for manipulation, the h-index remains a useful tool for evaluating the performance of individual authors and comparing researchers and institutions. Hence, the potential predictors of the index were discussed along with its calculation methods. The h-index in conjunction with other metrics and factors for evaluating research productivity and impact was also highlighted.

Self-Assessment Multiple-Choice Questions

Five questions are available in Table 4 for self-assessment of your learning from this article.

Self-assessment multiple-choice questions

Q1: The correct answer is D. Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science show the h-index of an author

Q2: The correct answer is D. We need the total papers and their citations to be arranged in higher to lower order for ease of identification of the h-index.

Q3: The correct answer is C. Three papers of the author have received at least three citations each.

Q4: The correct answer is B. Six papers of the author have received at least six citations each.

Q5: The correct answer is D. The h-index only takes papers and their citations. m-value considers the years of activity of an author

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Quantifying the Impact of My Publications: What is the h index?

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What is the h index?

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The h index was proposed by J.E. Hirsch in 2005 and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . [i]   The h index is a quantitative metric based on analysis of publication data using publications and citations to provide “an estimate of the importance, significance, and broad impact of a scientist’s cumulative research contributions .” [ii]    According to Hirsch, the h index is defined as: “ A scientist has index h if h of his or her Np papers have at least h citations each and the other (Np – h) papers have ≤h citations each .”

As an example, an h index of 10 means that among all publications by one author, 10 of these publications have received at least 10 citations each.  

Hirsch argues that the h index is preferable to other single-number criteria, such as the total number of papers, the total number of citations and citations per paper. However, Hirsch includes several caveats:

• A single number can never give more than a rough approximation to an individual’s multifaceted profile;
• Other factors should be considered in combination in evaluating an individual;
• There will be differences in typical h values in different fields, determined in part by the average number of references in a paper in the field, the average number of papers produced by each scientist in the field, and the size (number of scientists) of the field; and
• For an author with a relatively low h that has a few seminal papers with extraordinarily high citation counts, the h index will not fully reflect that scientist’s accomplishments. [iii]

Since Hirsch introduced the h index in 2005, this measure of academic impact has garnered widespread interest as well as proposals for other indices based on analyses of publication data such as the g index, h (2) index, m quotient, r index, to name a few.

Several commonly used databases, such as Elsevier’s Scopus , Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science , and Google Scholar   provide h index values for authors.

[i] Hirsch JE. An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 November 15; 102(46): 16569–16572. doi:  10.1073/pnas.0507655102

[ii] Ibid. p. 16569.

[iii] Ibid. p. 16571

Resources to Find the h index

• Google Scholar Google Scholar provides the h index for authors who have created a profile.
• Publish or Perish Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations from Google Scholar and provides the h index among other metrics. Publish or Perish is handy for obtaining the h index for authors who do not have a Google Scholar profile.
• Scopus Scopus provides a Citation Tracker feature that allows for generation of a Citation Overview chart to generate a h index for publications and citations from 1970 to current. The feature also allows for removal of self-citations from the overall citation counts.
• Web of Science Core Collection Web of Science allows for generation of the h index for publications and citations from 1970 to current using the "Create Citation Report" feature.

Understanding the h index

Do You Need an h index Report?

Do you need an h index report.

We provide h index reports (Scopus and/or Web of Science) to members of the Washington University in St. Louis community.

Contact Amy Suiter to request a report.

Strengths and Shortcomings

Strengths of the h index

• The h index is a metric for evaluating the cumulative impact of an author’s scholarly output and performance; measures quantity with quality by comparing publications to citations.
• The h index corrects for the disproportionate weight of highly cited publications or publications that have not yet been cited.
• Several resources automatically calculate the h index as part of citation reports for authors.

Shortcomings of the h index

• The h index is a metric to assess the entire body of scholarly output by an author; not intended for a specific timeframe.
• The h index is insensitive to publications that are rarely cited such as meeting abstracts and to publications that are frequently cited such as reviews.
• Author name variant issues and multiple versions of the same work pose challenges in establishing accurate citation data for a specific author.
• The h index does not provide the context of the citations.
• The h index is not considered a universal metric as it is difficult to compare authors of different seniority or disciplines. Young investigators are at a disadvantage and academic disciplines vary in the average number of publications, references and citations.
• Self-citations or gratuitous citations among colleagues can skew the h index.
• The h index will vary among resources depending on the publication data that is included in the calculation of the index.
• The h index disregards author ranking and co-author characteristics on publications.
• There are instances of “paradoxical situations” for authors who have the same number of publications, with varying citation counts, but have the same h index. As an example, Author A has eight publications which have been cited a total of 338 times and Author B also has eight publications which have been cited a total of 28 times. Author A and Author B have the same h index of 5 but Author A has a higher citation rate than Author B. See Balaban, AT. 2012. Positive and negative aspects of citation indices and journal impact factors. Scientometrics. DOI: 10.1007/s11192-102-0637-5

Is There an Alternative to the h index?: The m value

The m value is a correction of the h index for time (m = h/y). According to Hirsch,  m is an “ indicator of the successfulness of a scientist ” and can be used to compare scientists of different seniority. The m value can be seen as an indicator for “scientific quality” with the advantage (as compared to the h index) that the m value is corrected for career length.

What are the Ranges?

Per Hirsch:

• h index of 20 after 20 years of scientific activity, characterizes a successful scientist
• h index of 40 after 20 years of scientific activity, characterizes outstanding scientists, likely to be found only at the top universities or major research laboratories.
• h index of 60 after 20 years, or 90 after 30 years, characterizes truly unique individuals.
• h index of 15-20, fellowship in the National Physical Society.
• h index of 45 or higher, membership in the National Academy of Sciences.

Other works that discuss the h index in comparison to various medical specialties are noted here .

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Research guidance, Research Journals, Top Universities

Explaining H-index, i10-index, G-index & other research metrics

This blog post aims to explain various  research metrics like the h-index, i-10 index, and g-index . Moreover, we will also be explaining how you can increase these research metrics .

Page Contents

Measuring your research impact

Researchers use different metrics to measure the quality of published papers in journals . It basically gives an idea of the impact of any research paper . These metrics can be applied to any publication on any subject across the world. Through research metrics, one can monitor and quantify published articles. These citation metrics ultimately help in getting a university’s ranking .

Research metrics are one of the most established ways to measure the quality of research work. It tells the importance of particular research. Nowadays, H-index, impact factor , G-index, i-10 index are commonly used research metrics. These metrics help in measuring how much a researcher’s article is cited by the co-researchers. It helps in increasing the impact of the research work.  Researchers can use these metrics for availing various fellowships and scholarships, and gaining job opportunities across the world. 

Also, read the following articles:

Difference between SCI, SCIE, and ESCI journals

Difference between Scopus and Web of Science (WoS)

What is the h-index?

It is commonly known as the Hirsch number or Hirsch index. It was developed by American physicist Jorge E. Hirsch in 2005. h-index can be defined as for a given value of h, the researchers should h number of published articles that are cited at least by h-times. Suppose the author has an h-index of 25, which means that each of his published articles is cited at least 25 times by other researchers. It mainly gives an idea of the quality of the research papers. Generally, the higher the h-index, the greater the impact of a research paper will be. Thus, the h-index can be used to measure the quality and quantity of the research paper simultaneously. The h-index for any author can be determined manually with the help of any citation database. Using Scopus or Web of Science data, the h-index can also be calculated.

What is the i-10 index?

It is another commonly used research metric by the authors/researchers. i-10 index is provided by Google Scholar . It can define as a measure of having publications with at least 10 citations. For example, if an author/researcher’s i-10 index is 6, it indicates that six of his/her publications are cited 10 times. i-10 index also helps in increasing the weightage of any student profile. The main advantage of the i-10 index is that it can be calculated very easily. Google Scholar provides easy and free access to find out these metrics. 

Charles Robert Darwin, a renowned scientist, has the highest number of citations to date. This scientist has 156678 citations with an h-index of 106 and an i-10 index of 526. This means this researcher has received at least 10 citations for each of the 526 published articles. An h-index of 106 means that, out of his total publications, his 106 articles have been cited at least 106 times by different researchers.

What is G-index?

It is another level of measuring research metrics. It was suggested by Leo Egge in 2006. In general, the h-index does include a citation count of highly cites papers. But g-index helps in boosting the profile of a researcher by giving preference to highly cited papers. G-index is basically an advanced version of the h-index.  G-index measures the citation performance for a set of articles. A g-index of 20 indicates that the top 20 publications in a researcher/author profile are cited by 400 times (20 2 ). Similarly, a g-index of 10 indicates that the top 10 publications in a researcher profile are cited by 100 times (10 2) . 

How to increase the h-index? 

In the present scenario, the quality of any published article is measured by the number of citations he/she received, research metrics like the impact factor of the journal he/she has published, and the h-index of any author profile. Generally, during the entire research career, if the researcher receives of h-index of 25 or more, it is considered to be an excellent researcher’s profile. However, on average most of the researchers have an h-index between 10-15.

• In order to increase the h-index, one must publish papers of high quality. The researcher should ensure that he/she has not published any article in predatory/fake journals . The researcher should publish more and more original research articles . Although, sometimes publishing more review articles receives a greater number of citations , that ultimately increases the h-index in a profile.  
• Secondly, another way of increasing the h-index is through proper communication of the published article. He/she can advertise through various social media platforms such as Twitter , and ResearchGate, and continuously update the Google scholar profile. This will mainly help in increasing the visibility of published articles. 
• Thirdly, the researchers while writing the manuscript , he/she should ensure that the title of the paper is simple, clear, short, and concise. He/she should use a maximum of 5-6 appropriate keywords in the abstract. The abstract should be written in a very informative manner. It should briefly describe the research study. The research paper should always explain the novelty/newness of his/her article. Usually, the first sentence of the article appears in the all-search engines. So, it should be written in a very attractive manner. The abstract should be written in a such way it gives an overall summary of the research findings. 
• Fourthly, if it is possible, the researcher should publish in open-access journals . OA journals also undergo a peer-review process. Generally, these journals are available on online platforms which are easy to access and free of charge. Through open-access journals, readers can get full-text access to published articles easily. It will ultimately draw the attention of more audiences, which will ultimately help in gaining citations, thus increasing the h-index. 

What is considered to be a good i-10 index? 

Similar to the h-index, if the author/researcher has an i-10 index of 25 or more, it is considered an excellent research profile. An i-10 index of 25 means that, out of total publications, the researcher has received at least 10 citations for every 25 published articles. The i-10 index differs from researcher to researcher. It mainly depends on the subject area and sub-section of the research area. Generally, publishing more articles related to solving practical problems receives a greater number of citations. Professors with arts and humanities backgrounds may not have a higher i-index as compared to professors with science backgrounds. However, the i-10 index is the second-well-recognized research metric after the h-index.

I Hope, this blog post will help you to understand various research metrics used in research.

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What Is a Good H-Index Required for an Academic Position?

Posted by Rene Tetzner | Sep 3, 2021 | Career Advice for Academics , How To Get Published | 0 |

What Is a Good H-Index Required for an Academic Position? Metrics are important. Even scholars who may not entirely agree with the ways in which academic and scientific impact is currently measured and used cannot deny that metrics play a significant role in determining who receives research grants, employment offers and desirable promotions. The h-index is only one among various kinds of metrics now applied to the research-based writing of professional scholars, but it is an increasingly significant one. Introduced by the physicist Jorge Hirsch in a paper published in 2005, the h-index was designed to assess the quantity and quality of a scientist’s contributions and predict his or her productivity and influence in the coming years. However, its use and importance have quickly expanded beyond physics and the sciences into a wide variety of disciplines and fields of study. If you are applying for a scientific or academic position, hoping for a promotion or in need of research funding, it will therefore be wise to give your h-index score some consideration, but within reason. In some fields, the h-index and other forms of metrics play a very small part if any in hiring and funding, and there are still many other means used by hiring and funding committees to assess scholarly contributions.

The h-index is considered preferable to metrics that measure only a researcher’s number of publications or the number of times those publications have been cited. This is because it combines the two, considering both publications and citations to arrive at a particular value. A scholar who has five publications that have been cited at least five times has an h-index of 5, whereas a scholar with ten publications that have been cited ten times has an h-index of 10. Publication and citation patterns differ markedly across disciplines and fields of study, and the expectations of hiring and funding bodies vary depending on the level and type of position and the kind and size of research project, so it is impossible to say exactly what might be considered an acceptable or competitive h-index in a given situation. H-index scores between 3 and 5 seem common for new assistant professors, scores between 8 and 12 fairly standard for promotion to the position of tenured associate professor, and scores between 15 and 20 about right for becoming a full professor. Be aware, however, that these are gross generalisations and actual figures vary enormously among disciplines and fields: there are, for instance, many full professors, deans and chancellors with very low h-index scores, and an exceptional young researcher with an h-index of 10 or 15 might conceivably still be working on a post doctorate.

As a general rule in many fields, an h-index that matches the number of years a scholar has been working in the field is a respectable score. Hirsch in fact suggested that the h-index be used in conjunction with a scholar’s active research time to arrive at what is known as Hirsch’s individual m. It is calculated by dividing a scientist’s h-index by the number of years that have passed since the first publication, with a score of 1 being very good indeed, 2 being outstanding and 3 truly exceptional. This means that if you have published at least one well-cited document each year since your first publication – a decent textual output by any measure – you are among a successful group of scholars, and if you have published two or three times that number of well-cited documents over the same period of time, you are among the intellectual superstars of your discipline and probably of your time. To put this into perspective, from what I can find online it looks like Stephen Hawking has a score of about 1.6 by this calculation. If you can approach a hiring committee or funding body with anything close to that, you are certainly going to be a serious contender in the competition.

The h-index as a measure of both the quantity and quality of scholarly achievement is considered quite reliable and robust, so it has proved incredibly popular and is now applied not only to individual researchers, but also to research groups and projects, to scholarly journals and publishers, to academic and scientific departments, to entire universities and even to entire countries. As with all metrics, however, the h-index is subject to a number of biases and limitations, so there are significant problems associated with relying solely on h-index scores when making important research and career decisions. The h-index does not, for example, account for publications with citation numbers far above a researcher’s h-index or distinguish any difference between publications with a single author or many. Older publications are counted exactly as more recent ones are and older scholars benefit, whether they have published anything new in years or not. Neither the length of a publication nor the nature of each citation (positive or negative) is considered, so those measures of quantity and quality are not part of the picture. Early career researchers who take the time to delve deeply into an important problem and eventually produce an excellent article and scholars at any stage in their careers who dedicate time to teaching or practical applications of research will have lower scores than those who crank out mediocre articles based on uninteresting research that is nonetheless cited by their colleagues. Finally, the databases from which the h-index and other metrics are determined vary in the types of documents they consider and the fields of study they include, so the same scholar will not receive the same h value across all of them, and accurate comparison across fields and disciplines is impossible.

These and other problems have generated a number of adjustments that are rather similar to Hirsch’s individual m, which, as discussed above, considers a scholar’s active research time in relation to his or her h-index. The g-index gives greater weight to publications whose citation counts exceed a researcher’s h value; the hi index corrects for the number of authors; the hc index corrects for the age of publications, with recent citations earning more counts; and the c-index considers collaboration distance between the author of a publication and the authors citing it. Solutions for comparison between disciplines and fields have included dividing the h-index scores of scholars by the h-index averages in their respective fields to arrive at results that can be compared, but defining fields can be tricky, and larger fields of study with more researchers naturally generate more citations. The databases used for scholarly metrics are constantly upgrading and broadening their inclusiveness to render metrics like the h-index more truly representative of a researcher’s actual productivity and impact, so the accuracy and consistency of these tools are likely to continue improving. However, no new numbers or calculations can add what all of these metrics lack, and that is research content – the valuable and unique content that makes the publication of research a worthy task in the first place.

Committees gathered to hire or promote faculty or to select the recipients of research grants rarely rely solely on metrics when making their decisions. If they are doing their jobs properly, they combine what they can gather from metrics with other information about candidates and their scholarly impact. They do not just notice how many times the papers of candidates have been cited; they read those papers and consider their content, and they pay attention to the other activities of the scholars they are considering. This wider perspective is appropriate for an applicant as well, so if you are polishing your CV, putting together a grant application or preparing for a job interview, look over your own unique achievements with a kindly yet critical eye and consider them in direct relation to what the job posting or grant regulations indicate is wanted. If you happen to have a wonderful h-index score or any other impressive metrics, by all means flaunt them, and if you fear that a low h value will compromise your career aspirations, do what you can to have your publications with lower citation counts read and used more often, update your profiles on the relevant databases, and publish the type of document sure to garner citations in your field, such as a review article.

Do keep in mind, however, that hiring and funding committees are often looking for far more than large numbers of highly cited publications. Admittedly, they rarely balk at them, but universities are also seeking excellent teachers, advisors and administrators, so play up those skills and any related experience you have, and remember that financial supporters of research may be keen to fund scholars who can successfully manage and complete projects, even and perhaps especially if part of the training they offer younger researchers means that their students tend to publish most of the results. Finally, an active online presence in your field established through sharing your research via blogs, professional platforms and social media might not garner the same respect as formal publications, but it can count for a great deal when many universities are working to increase their online activities and funding bodies working to democratise the publication of the research they support. Generally speaking, committees considering applications will be even more likely to google the names of candidates and applicants than to look up the metrics associated with them, so assume that both will be done and ensure that what can be found shares excellent research content and leaves a desirable professional impression of you and your work.

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What Is a Good H-Index Required for an Academic Position? The h-index is used along with applicants research & skills to measure their impact

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The H-Index: good or bad?

Anyone working in academia is well-aware of the ubiquity of h-indexes. To many professors and graduate students, the h-index is perhaps the most widely used metric in determining the influence of one’s work. This single number is used to convey the influence you have had in your research career, is pivotal to career advancement, and used in part to determine the relative influence of difference academic institutions. Given the ubiquity and power of such an index on the academic sphere, we must pause for a second and ask, is this actually the best method for ranking the merit of different scientists? Have we perhaps learned better alternatives of ranking publications within our own course?

First off, I shall define the h-index:

The h-index of an author, h, is the largest number x such that there are x articles published by the author which have at least x references. In other words, h is the maximum number of publications by a scientist that were cited at least h times.

As can be seen, this metric (developed by Jorge Eduardo Hirsch of UCSD in 2005) is used to measure the quality and quantity of a researcher’s work. The inventor, Hirsch himself, proposes that after 20 years of research, an h-index of 20 is good, 40 is outstanding, and 60 is exceptional. It is an indicator that a researcher is reliable, consistently engaged in meaningful science and has publications that are largely adopted. However, time and time again, the h-index has proved ineffective to honour the importance of scientific endeavours.

First, consider the young and exceptional scientist. If in their short career, they have published 2 great papers, with thousands of citations, their h-index is just as good as another scientist who has worked for 20 years and published 2o papers, 2 of which each have 2 citations. Their is an implicit agism in the h-index that works against the interests of meritocracy.

Second, consider the scientist Y that is consistently published by the best journals. H-index does not discriminate between the authority of different hubs, and the achievement of being published in a great journal is treated equal to being published in the worst one. The h-index does not take into account the fact that some citations are more impressive than others, and more indicative of meaningful work. It is not fair to treat every referrer with the same sense of credibility.

Third, authors are encouraged by h-index to produce less important publications that would enhance their index, as the h-index is bounded by the minimum number of articles. For instance, I could compartmentalise my research into 4 different research papers for a better h-index, even though the ideas might be better expressed in a single research paper. This creates a culture in academia of prioritising quantity: publishing more papers to convey influence, instead of focusing on the quality and merit of the science itself.

I could not help but pause and think, have we learned a better model in our Networks class? Could we not provide a better score than the H-Index?

I came across a most though-provoking article in PLOS, a non-profit tech and medicine publisher that contains open-access journals:

The Pagerank-Index: Going beyond Citation Counts in Quantifying Scientific Impact of Researchers

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.013479

They propose using the page-rank algorithm (as discussed in class) to rank publications in the citation network. Each node gets a value after this process, which can then be distributed to each author, and the summation of all page-rank values is obtained for every author. This can then be compared to all other author values to form the percentile.

The advantage of doing so, is that PageRank can compare the sources of information and determine which references are more-trustworthy. As discussed in lectures, PageRank is calculated recursively and depends on the metric of all pages that link to it. Each page spreads it vote equally among all out-links. If a page is linked to by many high ranked pages, it achieves a high rank.

Here, not all citations are equal, and a publications is important if it is pointed to by other important publications. This is the beauty of PageRank, an elegant solution which we have covered in our course.

In this case, we make the scientific world more meritocratic. We give the potential to young authors to be taken seriously, if they have already produced valuable works. Further, we give credence to researchers that are being published in amazing scientific journals over mediocre ones. We could also implement a variance of HITS to achieve similar outcomes, and there are a myriad of strategies we have learned in class that could create a more fair academic environment.

In conclusion, the H-index should be forgotten! Let the academic world move forward, and benefit from the might of Networks and Google’s innovation. After all, Google Scholar is one of the most ubiquitous users of the h-index, and the company itself could lead the way by reverting back to their own early innovations! Let us use the PageRank algorithm to evaluate scientific research in a fair manner!

November 13, 2020 | category: Uncategorized

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Why I love the H-index

The H-index – a small number with a big impact.  First introduced by Jorge E. Hirsh in 2005, it is a relatively simple way to calculate and measure the impact of a scientist (Hirsch, 2005). It divides opinion.  You either love it or hate it. I happen to think the H-index is a superb tool to help assess scientific impact.  Of course, people are always favourable towards metrics that make them look good.  So let’s get this out into the open now, my H-index is 44 (I have 44 papers with at least 44 citations) and, yes, I’m proud of it! But my love of the H-index stems from a much deeper obsession with citations.

As an impressionable young graduate student, I saw my PhD supervisor regularly check his citations.  Citations to papers means that someone used your work or thought it was relevant to mention in the context of their own work.  If a paper was never cited, and perhaps therefore also little read, was it worth doing the research in the first place? I still remember the excitement of the first citation I ever received and I still enjoy seeing new citations roll in.

The H index: what does it mean, how is it calculated and used?

The H-index measures the maximum number of papers N you have, all of which have at least N citations. So if you have 3 papers with at least 3 citations, but you don’t have 4 papers with at least 4 citations then your H-index is 3. Obviously, the H-index can only increase if you keep publishing papers and they are cited.  But the higher your H-index gets, the harder it is to increase it.

One of the ways in which I use the H-index is when making tenure recommendations. By placing the candidate within the context of the H-indices of their departmental peers, I can judge the scientific output of the candidate within the context of the host institution. This is a useful because it can be difficult to understand what is required at different host institutions from around the world.  It would be negligent to only look at H-index and so I use a range of other metrics as well,  together with good old fashioned scientific judgement of their contributions from reading their application and papers.

The m value

One of those extra metrics I use was also introduced by Hirsch, and is called m (Hirsch, 2005). M measures the slope or rate of increase of the H-index over time and is, in my view, a greatly underappreciated measure.   To calculate the m -value, take the researchers H-index and divide by the number of years since their first publication. This measure helps to normalise between those at the early or twilight stages of their career. As Hirsch did for physicists in the field of computational biology, I broadly categorise people according to their m value in the table below.  The boundaries correspond exactly to those used by Hirsch.

So post-docs with an m -value of greater than three are future science superstars and highly likely to have a stratospheric rise. If you can find one, hire them immediately!

The H-trajectory

The graph below shows the growth of the H-index for three scientists  – A, B and C – who respectively have an H-index of 12, 15 and 16.  I call these curves a researcher’s H-trajectory.

If we calculate their m -value, then we find that A has a value of 0.5, B has 0.94 and C a value of 1.67. So while each of these researchers has a similar H-index, their likelihood for future growth can be predicted based on past performance. Recently, Daniel Acuna and colleagues presented a sophisticated prediction of future H-index using a number of several features, such as number of publications and the number in top journals (Acuna et al . 2012).

As any serious citation gazer knows, the H-index has numerous potential problems. For example, researcher A who spent time in industry has fewer publications, people with names in non English alphabets or very common names can be difficult to correctly calculate, different fields have widely differing authorship, publication and citation patterns. But even considering all these problems, I believe the H-index is here to stay.  My experience is that ranking scientists by H-index and m-value correlates very well with my own personal judgements about the impact of scientists that I know and indeed with the positions that those scientists hold in Universities around the world.

Alex Bateman is currently a computational biologist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute where he has led the Pfam database project. On Novembert 1st, he takes up a new role as  Head of Protein Sequence Resources at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI).

J.E. Hirsch. An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 102, 16569-16572.

D.E. Acuna, S. Allesina & P. Konrad. Predicting scientific success. Nature 489, 201-202.

The problem with the H factor is that it is, to a considerable extent, a measure of how old you are. The m index is supposed to correct this but it can distort things by assuming a linearity that just isn’t there in the development of a scientist.

The alternative I propose is the H5Y factor. It is the H factor, but calculated only on citations received in the past five years. This equalizes the playing field and my guess is that it is a much better predictor of performance for the next five years than H or m. Who cares what you have published thirty years ago? (unless it is still being cited, of course!)

I agree with Constantin, and would add that the m-index is particularly unfair to those who take early career breaks, since it takes several years before the penalty of having a gap after their first few papers starts to become trivially small.

Interestingly, Google Scholar’s “My Citations” pages (e.g. see my profile link for a not-so-random example!) does calculate what Constantin proposes, an H-index computed from the last five years’ citations, though they don’t call it H5Y. Personally, though I agree that this is better than H, I still think it’s a rather biased measure of quality, which more strongly reflects quantity or length of active career.

Funnily enough, I think Google are already using a better measure (which they call H5), but only for their journal rankings, not their author profiles, see e.g. scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=top_venues This measure is the H-index for work published in the last five years, rather than just cited in the last five years, and they call this H5.

I think it would be great if Google Citations profiles showed H5 for authors, but frustratingly, Google’s FAQ indicates that they are opposed to adding new metrics: http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html#citations But perhaps Scopus, ResearcherID, Academia.edu, ResearchGate or similar will add H5 in the future…

[…] Crushing it Among Nobel Science Winners Why I love the H-index (not sure I’m afraid or in agreement) A Simple Way to Reduce the Excess of Antibiotics […]

Most of the H-trajectory plots that I have created for active scientists do show quite a linear trend. I only showed three in my graph above, but researcher A was the only significant deviation that I found. Creating these H-trajectory plots was not as easy as I thought it was going to be. Downloading the full citation data is time consuming given the limits imposed by SCOPUS and ISI. I also found that the underlying data for citations was not nearly as clean as I expected.

I agree that it is important to be able to take account of career breaks so that we do not penalise researchers unfairly. Being able to plot the H-trajectory might help spot these. But as I mentioned in the article these metrics should only be used as part of a wider evaluation of individuals outputs. I tend to agree with the google view on the proliferation of metrics that this could lead to more confusion than it solves. But H5-like measures seem like another reasonable way to normalise out the length of career issue.

I find Google Scholar far better than ISI. It is updated more regularly and gives better representation to publications in non-English journals. I would choose it over others to calculate any sort of index.

Ok, but why would the h-index given by an online calculator ever be higher than the number of publications?

I agree with Alex. I had the same experience, whether to recruit post-docs, young group leaders or evaluate tenure (and even in one case head of large institute). After 3, 10, 20 or 30 years of research, the h-index and m numbers are very good to evaluate not only the brilliance at one point, but also the steady success. You do not hire the genious who had only one magic paper and nothing else significant. The likelyhood that the magic happens again is very low. You have to compare with peers though. Having been an experimental neuroscientist and a computational modeller I know that the citation patterns are quite different. However, when using the H-index to compare people, we are generally in a situation where we compare similar scientists.

All that of course being a way to quickly sort out A, B or C lists, and uncovering potential problems (100 publications and h-index of 10). After that step, you need to evaluate the candidates more attentively, using interviews etc. But interestingly you very rarely read the publications. In the first screen you have too many of them and in the second you do not need them anymore.

(and I am “excellent” yeah! Not “stellar” though. One delusion I have to get rid of 😉 )

Interesting logic exercises. What about superstars who translate their work into patents/products and can not publish due company confidentiality, company goals, etc? Patents are not cited anywhere close to publications. Organic journals often have low impact factors and low citation rates as the animal studies in higher impact journals always overshadow the original synthetic papers. A good friend of mine has an H-index of only 7 but has designed a block-buster drug (and several other promising leads)–I would trade my inflated H-Index (product of a hot, speculative field) in a minute to have his stock options–oh and that drug that helps tens of thousands everyday. Sorry to burst that bubble–H-Indexers. Used to be a believer but I have now seen the light. Yep–and I would also take that “flash in the pan” invention of PCR (and the Nobel) over 50 years of high citations. One flash can have a greater impact than a thousand scientists over a thousand years.

[…] is reading about the H-index from someone with a big one. Does side matter? When it comes to how many times your works get cited it […]

Thanks for the helpful discussion. I just googled “what is a good h-index” and yours was the first thing to come up. I think as with any single statistic it has limitations, but overall is a decent reflection of output, especially for comparison with similar applicants for a position.

I’d convert your m index based on h-index/(fte years working since first paper) which would take account of breaks/part-time working. This would particularly help women remain competitive in the context of extended periods of part-time working. So my 10 years since 1st paper would turn into 10-1-(5*0.6) = 6, so my m index is 2 = 12/6 instead of 12/10. Woo!

Anyway I don’t think anything will stop me checking my citations obsessively and google citations is the easiest place I’ve found to keep my publications organised.

Amen. Coming from someone who was stuck too long in a company in which publishing in the open domain was a big no-no. H-index is one number, but it is not _the_ number. Neither are Google’s variations, and so forth. For example, IQ is another number, it has it uses, but it clearly isn’t _the_ number either. Me not like metrics so much.

I like the m-value, but it has the unfortunate effect of penalising the early starter. For example, someone who publishes a paper from their Hons thesis may be penalised by 3-4 years in the denominator producing their m-value when compared with someone starting publishing in the third or fourth year of their PhD. So I would take Kate’s idea further, and use FTE as THE denominator when calculating m, instead of years since first paper. This could include time spent as a PhD student, or not, as long as it was standardised.

Google Scholar gives exactly this statistic under the standard h-value.

One problem with H or M index can be how many people are actively involved in the research in a particular field. For example, there are only ~186 laboratories in the whole world working on my previous field, Candida albicans. But, right now I am working on cancer biology. Huge number of people are working in that field, hence the h index will increase dramatically.

I think that is a good suggestion. It is important to take account of career breaks when judging peoples scientific output. Its not perfect to just subtract the break length or some combination of time. Even during a career break your pre-break papers will still be cited and potentially increasing your H-index. But to a first approximation what you suggest makes good sense. It would be interesting to look at the H-trajectories of people who have taken a career break to see how it affects growth of H-index.

Yes that is a good point. Publishing a paper during your degree should be seen as a strong positive indicator in my opinion and as you say not penalise the person. OK, so lets use years of FTE employment as the denominator.

It is best to only using H-index for comparing people within the same field. I’m not sure that moving field is any guarantee of increasing H-index, but it will be easier for your H-index to grow in the large field. I guess the smart thing to do is to start in cancer biology then move to the specialist field 😉

I don’t like h index when it is used to rank journals as it basically gives a statistics about the best papers in that journal. For example if nature has a 5 year h index of 300, it only says something about those 300 papers and nothing about the thousands of other papers they published. Because of that, plos one has a very high h index, I think ranked top 30, but that just reflects the number of elite papers being published there, not the tens of thousands of junk papers it publishes..

My problem with h-index for insividuals is that it does not differentiate first author papers from contributing author papers. A tech could be put in 50 high impact papers over 5-6 years because he is in a super high impact lab for technical contributions. However a post doc in such a lab would have much fewer papers because be would be focusing on making first author papers. However in the end, the tech would have a higher h index. Is that a fair assessment? Also that tech could be a postdoc in name but doing tech work. Would such a technician postdoc be at a higher advantage to employers who only look at h index?

The extreme scenarios given to discount H-index can be absurd: a) A tech having 50 papers! I do not know a tech that is put on 50 papers in 5 years in any lab. If such a tech exists, then he/she is a superstar tech and needs to be celebrated. b) why penalize someone who publishes in their PhD with an m index- well you forget that if someone publishes early, then their h index will increase because their papers will start collecting citations early so even if the denominator is increased by a few years, isn’t the numerator also increased? c) In chemistry, there was a table of the top 500, based on h-index. All on that table were superstars, by other metrics, and all the recent nobel prize winners were on that list. There was not a single name on that list who was not famous. I agree that one can not use h index to different between h of say 15 and 20. But if someone has an h of say 60 and the other has 30, there is usually a light and day between them. The h is here to stay.

None of the above addresses key weaknesses of the h-index – self citation and citation rings.

If you work in large collaborations and projects it is *easy* for *many* people to rack up large numbers of citations (and h-indices) by citing each others papers and by simply appearing on lots of papers for which they have done little work. At the very least I believe citations should be a conserved quantity – one citation is one citation, and if it to is a paper with 100 authors then it should not add 1 citation to *each* of those author’s records, it should add 0.01 (or some other agreed fraction dictated by author order such that Sigma (fraction) =1).

Then, self-citations, both in the form of you citing your own paper, or any papers upon which a co-author appears citing that paper should not count.

This would cut many h-indices down to size and be a much truer reflection of an individual’s contribution.

What’s your normalised (by number of authors) h-index, excluding self-citations?

[…] https://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2012/10/19/why-i-love-the-h-index/ Tweet!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); […]

Out lab publishes over 40 papers a year and has three techs contributing to almost every paper for technical work. They have higher h then postdocs.

But what is worse are PIs who do no work and don’t even read the paper but is still on the author list…apparently a common occurrence for high energy physics consortiums.

[…] h-index weaknesses with various computational models that, for example, reward highly-cited papers, correct for career length, rank authors’ papers against other papers published in the same year and source, or count just […]

There should be a metrics which weigh the author position. Typically first author does all the work. So the first authorship and the final authorship should have higher weightage compared to other authorships. Personally, I think the name appearing after the third author and before the final author should not have any weightage

[…] Many have attempted to fix the h-index weaknesses with various computational models that, for example, reward highly-cited papers, correct for career length, […]

[…] was re-reading a blog post by Alex Bateman on his affection for the H-index as a tool for evaluating up-and-coming scientists. He describes Jorge Hirsch’s H-index, its […]

1. Take out self citations 2. Take out review article citations 3. Have a negative field (topic) correction factor. 4. Have a negative correction factor for study section member, journal editor etc. 5. have a name and country correction factor.

Then let us compete…

I strongly agree about taking out citations for review articles. They totally distort the evaluation of a scientists’ worth. Reviews are cited much more highly than oritinal articles and contribute zero to the advancment of science by their authors. Less strongly, I also agree about self-citations because it is so hard to distinguish between genuine ones and irrelevant self-serving ones.

As both journal editor and study section member, I can assure you that neither capacity does anything to citations. I can’t think of anyone gratuitously citing my papers so that they can get preferential treatment. This is preposterous.

Finally, topic and country corrections are much more meaningful to apply to the final use of the h-factor than to its calculation. Whether that use is promotion, tenure, new appointment or funding, you are competing against your compatriot colleagues in the same field. Across countries, most responsible decision makers will apply a correction factor. When looking at post-doc applicants, I will rather take someone from, e.g. India with h=3 than from the US with h=5.

I do not quite agree with a country correction. Nobody cites you because you hail from a particular country. Your work is cited because its good, relevant and has helped somebody in their research and not just because you are a compatriot.

There is a bit more subtlety to country considerations. I agree that an author’s self-interest would strongly motivate them to cite the best paper that supports the point they are making, regardless of where the paper came from. However, we are judging the author here, not the paper. Across countries, there are huge discrepancies in terms of opportunities authors had to reach any given H value.

Put yourself in the position of a lab director going through post-doc applications. You narrow it down to two applicants, both H=5, one of them achieved it by working in the US, the other by working in, say, Tunisia. All other things being equal, who is more likely to have stellar performance in your lab?

This is what I mean when I say that the country correction should apply to the final use of the H, but not to its calculation.

If it comes down to selecting one among two-three people, the selection will fully be based upon how well the interview go with that person. Whether he will perform well or not will be gauged through the interview and not by the H index

[…] Source: blogs.plos.org […]

[…] but she send me a few links later on and while reading them through I slowly began to understand. This one she send me as well and helped me the most in understanding the whole […]

[…] A career in science depends more and more on quantitative measures that aim to evaluate the efficiency of work and the future potential of a researcher. Most of these measures depend on publishing output, thus many people conclude that we live in a “publish or perish” environment. Nowadays universities also face austerity measures and one could say, that we are living in “post-doc-apocalyptic” times, meaning that a large number of postdocs (working under temporary contracts) are competing for a small number of tenure positions. Altogether, universities make a very competitive environment. Quantitative indicators, like the h-index, are becoming more and more important in this competition. Should you take notice of them? If you want to work in academia, you should. You will probably see a lot of disadvantages in this output-orientated system, but this is where we are at today. Taking care of your career, might require strategic decision making, which has to take into account possibilities of improving your quantitative indicators also. What is the h-index? Despite the fact that its relatively new (it was described for the first time in 2005), the h-index has become an important measure of career development. Just today I saw an academic job offer with a minimum h-index value added to the list of requirements. The h-index is generally used for choosing candidates for promotions and grant fundings. It is very often used as an official criteria, but in other cases it can be used by referees or reviewers to evaluate research output, because it is easy for anyone to determine what is the exact value of this parameter (have a look here for a reasons to love h-index). […]

[…] h-index changes over time (though see Alex Bateman’s old blog post about “Why I love the h-index“, where he refers to the “h-trajectory”).  Does the “successful […]

[…] A. Why I love the h-index. PLoS […]

[…] on statistically assessing researchers based on publications, impact factors and H-index (Click for article on H-Index). Two people considered amongst the best scientists of the 20th century had this to […]

[…] https://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2012/10/19/why-i-love-the-h-index/ […]

h-index doesn’t make any sense. Although there are so many examples for that, few examples are given here. There is one scientist with h-index of 82 and 37,900 citations even at the beginning of her career. But she hasn’t written a single research paper in her life. Because she got the membership of many CERN groups in the world, she got her name among the thousand names given at the end of many research papers. She is not even a coauthor of any of those papers. Just because CERN members publish papers in so called US or European journals, google scholar search robot finds all those papers. Most of the CERN members got higher h-index and higher number of citations like that. On the other hand, there are some researchers who have written 70 to 100 papers. But they have a lower h-index below 10 and less number of citations, just because google search robot can’t find even many good journals. Google search robot easily finds US journals, because it thinks that US journals are reputed journals. When I was doing my Ph. D at early nineties, I read several research papers. I found one good paper with original data of ferrite thin films published by some Japanese scientists on a Japanese journal. Few years after that, I found that some US researchers have deposited the same material on the same substrate using same techniques. But the data of US researchers are worse than the data published by Japanese researchers. But US researchers have published their worse data even after one year in US journal of applied Physics. So how can someone say that US journals are the best?

[…] weaknesses with various computational models that, for example, reward highly-cited papers, correct for career length, rank authors’ papers against other papers published in the same year and source, or count just […]

[…] PLOS Biologue: Why I love the H-index – https://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2012/10/19/why-i-love-the-h-index/ […]

[…] Corregir según la duración de la carrera académica del autor […]

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Q. What is an h-index? How do I find the h-index for a particular author?

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Answered By: Laurissa Gann Last Updated: Mar 27, 2023     Views: 408370

The h-index is a number intended to represent both the productivity and the impact of a particular scientist or scholar, or a group of scientists or scholars (such as a departmental or research group). 

The h-index is calculated by counting the number of publications for which an author has been cited by other authors at least that same number of times.  For instance, an h-index of 17 means that the scientist has published at least 17 papers that have each been cited at least 17 times.  If the scientist's 18th most cited publication was cited only 10 times, the h-index would remain at 17.  If the scientist's 18th most cited publication was cited 18 or more times, the h-index would rise to 18.

Part of the purpose of the h-index is to eliminate outlier publications that might give a skewed picture of a scientist's impact.  For instance, if a scientist published one paper many years ago that was cited 9,374 times, but has since only published papers that have been cited 2 or 3 times each, a straight citation count for that scientist could make it seem that his or her long-term career work was very significant.  The h-index, however, would be much lower, signifying that the scientist's overall body of work was not necessarily as significant.

The following resources will calculate an h-index:

Web of Science

Pure (MD Anderson Faculty and Fellows listed)

Keep in mind that different databases will give different values for the h-index.  This is because each database must calculate the value based on the citations it contains.  Since databases cover different publications in different ranges of years, the h-index result will therefore vary.   You should also keep in mind that what is considered a "good" h-index may differ depending on the scientific discipline.  A number that is considered low in one field might be considered quite high in another field.

A note about Google Scholar

Google Scholar usually provides the highest h-index compared to other sources. This is because Google Scholar indexes web pages not organized collections of article citations, like databases. This means Google Scholar:

• Counts all publications, including books
• Counts all versions of a paper it finds, including preprints
• Counts self-citations 
• Counts citations added manually, but not necessarily verified by a publisher or other source

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