What do we know about the <i>h</i> index?
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and TechnologyPublished 27 April 2007
Lutz Bornmann, Hans‐Dieter Daniel
Citations663
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
The advantages and disadvantages of the h index are described and the studies on the convergent validity of this index are summarized and corrections and complements as well as single-number alternatives are introduced.
Abstract
Abstract Jorge Hirsch (2005a, 2005b) recently proposed the h index to quantify the research output of individual scientists. The new index has attracted a lot of attention in the scientific community. The claim that the h index in a single number provides a good representation of the scientific lifetime achievement of a scientist as well as the (supposed) simple calculation of the h index using common literature databases lead to the danger of improper use of the index. We describe the advantages and disadvantages of the h index and summarize the studies on the convergent validity of this index. We also introduce corrections and complements as well as single‐number alternatives to the h index.
Keywords
Computer ScienceDecision SciencesBusiness, Management and Accounting
Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesAn index to quantify an individual's scientific research output
11,535 Citations2005J. E. Hirsch
The index hbar, defined as the number of papers of an individual that have citation count larger than or equal to the citation count of all coauthors of each paper, is proposed as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher that takes into account the effect of multiple authorship.
ScientometricsTheory and practise of the g-index
2,302 Citations2006Leo Egghe
It is shown that the g-index inherits all the good properties of the h-index and better takes into account the citation scores of the top articles and yields a better distinction between and order of the scientists from the point of view of visibility.
Journal of DocumentationWhat do citation counts measure? A review of studies on citing behavior
1,531 Citations2008Lutz Bornmann, Hans‐Dieter Daniel
The general tendency of the results of the empirical studies makes it clear that citing behavior is not motivated solely by the wish to acknowledge intellectual and cognitive influences of colleague scientists, since the individual studies reveal also other, in part non‐scientific, factors that play a part in the decision to cite.
Information science and knowledge managementCitation Analysis in Research Evaluation
1,319 Citations2005Henk F. Moed
This work focuses on assessing Basic Science Research Departments and Scientific Journals, as well as Empirical and Theoretical Chapters, and the Citation Indexes, which summarize the literature on empirical and theoretical determinants of scientific research.
ScientometricsA Hirsch-type index for journals
670 Citations2006Tibor Braun, Wolfgang Glänzel +1 more
It is suggested that a h-type index - equal to h if you have published h papers, each of which has at least h citations - would be a useful supplement to journal impact factors.
ScientometricsComparison of the Hirsch-index with standard bibliometric indicators and with peer judgment for 147 chemistry research groups
609 Citations2006Anthony F. J. van Raan
Characteristics of the statistical correlation between the Hirsch (h-) index and several standard bibliometric indicators are presented, as well as with the results of peer review judgment, which show that the h-index and the bibliometry ‘crown indicator’ both relate in a quite comparable way with peer judgments.
ScientometricsSleeping Beauties in science
565 Citations2004Anthony F. J. van Raan
The first extensive measurement of the occurrence of Sleeping Beauties in the science literature is reported, derived from the measurements an ‘awakening’ probability function and identified the ‘most extreme Sleeping Beauty so far’.
ScientometricsIs it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests?
545 Citations2006Pablo Diniz Batista, Mônica G. Campiteli +1 more
A complementary index hI = h^2/N_t, with N_t being the total number of authors in the considered h papers, is proposed for comparison among different research areas.
ScientometricsGeneralized Hirsch h-index for disclosing latent facts in citation networks
432 Citations2007Antonis Sidiropoulos, Dimitrios Katsaros +1 more
The effectiveness and the benefits of the new indices are exhibited to unfold the full potential of the h-index, with extensive experimental results obtained from the DBLP, a widely known on-line digital library.
ScientometricsDoes the h-index for ranking of scientists really work?
401 Citations2005Lutz Bornmann, Hans‐Dieter Daniel
It was found that on average the h-index for successful applicants for post-doctoral research fellowships was consistently higher than for non-successful applicants.
Trends in Ecology & EvolutionThe h index and career assessment by numbers
398 Citations2006Clint D. Kelly, Michael D. Jennions
A new citation-based index (Hirsh's h index) is described and several factors that might influence it for ecologists and evolutionary biologists, such as gender, country of residence, subdiscipline and total publication output are examined.
ScientometricsAn informetric model for the Hirsch-index
308 Citations2006Leo Egghe, Ronald Rousseau
It is shown that in each practical situation an IPP always has a unique h-index, which is based on the total number of items in Lotkaian systems.
ScientometricsOn the h-index - A mathematical approach to a new measure of publication activity and citation impact
306 Citations2006Wolfgang Glänzel
L'index-h, fonde sur le nombre de citations recues, mesure l'activite de publication and l'impact en citations, c'est un indicateur utile avec d'interessantes proprietes mathematiques, mais qui ne saurait se substituer aux indicateurs bibliometriques courants plus sophistiques.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and TechnologyUsing the <i>h</i>‐index to rank influential information scientistss
302 Citations2006Blaise Cronin, Lokman I. Meho
It is shown how the h-index can be used to express the broad impact of a scholar's research output over time in more nuanced fashion than straight citation counts.
arXiv (Cornell University)An index to quantify an individual's scientific research valid across disciplines
283 Citations2005Pablo Diniz Batista, Mônica G. Campiteli +2 more
Measuring Science
268 Citations2004Anthony F. J. van Raan
ScientometricsScaling the h-index for different scientific ISI fields
234 Citations2007Juan Eugenio Iglesias, Carlos Pecharromán
A simple way to put in a common scale the h values of researchers working in different scientific ISI fields is proposed, so that the foreseeable misuse of this index for inter-areas comparison might be prevented, or at least alleviated.
ScientometricsAn extension of the Hirsch index: Indexing scientific topics and compounds
209 Citations2006Michael Banks
This quick method is shown to help new comers to identify how much interest and work has already been achieved in their chosen area of research by comparing both the hb index and m for a number of compounds and topics.
E-LIS Repository (University of Naples Federico II)On the Opportunities and Limitations of the H-index
183 Citations2006Wolfgang Glänzel
Lirias (KU Leuven)A Hirsch-type index for journals [1]
150 Citations2005Tibor Braun, Wolfgang Glänzel +1 more
E-LIS Repository (University of Naples Federico II)New developments related to the Hirsch index
149 Citations2006Ronald Rousseau
It is shown that the h-index on the one hand, and the A- and g-indices on the other, measure different things, and it would seem that the g-index is the more useful of the two.
ScientometricsSelection of research fellowship recipients by committee peer review. Reliability, fairness and predictive validity of Board of Trustees' decisions
128 Citations2005Lutz Bornmann, Hans‐Dieter Daniel
Bibliometric analysis showed that the selection procedure followed by the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds is thus highly valid: research articles by B.I.F. fellows are cited considerably more often than the “average' paper (average citation rate) published in the journal sets corresponding to the fields “Multidisciplinary', “Molecular Biology & Genetics', and “Biology & Biochemistry' in Essential Science Indicators (ESI).
ScientometricsSelecting scientific excellence through committee peer review - A citation analysis of publications previously published to approval or rejection of post-doctoral research fellowship applicants
117 Citations2006Lutz Bornmann, Hans‐Dieter Daniel
Investigation of committee peer review for awarding long-term fellowships to post-doctoral researchers as practiced by the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds confirms that the foundation is not only achieving its goal of selecting the best junior scientists for fellowship awards, but also successfully attracting highly talented young scientists to apply for B.I.F. fellowships.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and TechnologyDynamic <i>h</i>‐index: The Hirsch index in function of time
115 Citations2006Leo Egghe
The time dependence of the /7-index is determined and it is shown that h is a concavely increasing function of time, asymptotically bounded by T1 ∞.
E-LIS Repository (University of Naples Federico II)Simple models and the corresponding h- and g-index
42 Citations2006Ronald Rousseau
arXiv (Cornell University)Measures and Mismeasures of Scientific Quality
38 Citations2005Sune Lehmann, A.D. Jackson +1 more
A general Bayesian method for quantifying the statistical reliability of one-dimensional measures of scientific quality based on citation data, which shows that the mean, median and maximum number of citations are reliable and permit accurate predictions of future author performance on the basis of as few as 50 publications.
Refining the H-Index
38 Citations2006Jerome K. Vanclay
The use of a standard interval, without regard for the publication frequency of the journal or the nature of the discipline, introduces bias into both the journal impact factor and the h-index when applied to journals.
ScienceQuantifying Publication Impact
31 Citations2005Douglass F. Taber
The Random Samples item “Impact factor” (19 Aug., p. [1181][1]) noted the proposal by Jorge Hirsch that the total scientific output of a researcher can be judged by h, the largest number such that the researcher has at least h papers with h citations.
Lirias (KU Leuven)H-Index for Price Medalists
29 Citations2005Wolfgang Glänzel, Olle Persson
A look at the h-index of all still active Price Medal awardees, which is an extremely simple and compre-hensible indicator that is based on quite long publication periods and variable citationwindows, and it is predestined for purpose indeed.
E-LIS Repository (University of Naples Federico II)A case study : evolution of JASIS' Hirsch index
29 Citations2006Ronald Rousseau
Research EvaluationCommittee peer review at an international research foundation: predictive validity and fairness of selection decisions on post-graduate fellowship applications
21 Citations2005Lutz Bornmann, Hans‐Dieter Daniel
Investigation of committee peer review for awarding long-term fellowships to post-graduate researchers as practised by the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds shows that the selection procedure is thus highly valid and achieves its aim to select as fellowship recipients the best junior scientists.
arXiv (Cornell University)Universal Behavior of a Research Productivity Index
19 Citations2005Pablo Diniz Batista, Mônica G. Campiteli +2 more