H-index


The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar. The h-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The 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 or university or country. The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UC San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.

Definition and purpose

The h-index is defined as the maximum value of h such that the given author/journal has published h papers that have each been cited at least h times. The index is designed to improve upon simpler measures such as the total number of citations or publications. The index works properly only for comparing scientists working in the same field; citation conventions differ widely among different fields.

Calculation

Formally, if f is the function that corresponds to the number of
citations for each publication, we compute the h-index as follows: First we order the values of f from the largest to the lowest value.
Then, we look for the last position in which f is greater than or equal to the
position.
For example, if we have a researcher with 5 publications A, B, C, D, and E
with 10, 8, 5, 4, and 3 citations, respectively, the h-index is equal
to 4 because the 4th publication has 4 citations and the 5th has only 3.
In contrast, if the same publications have 25, 8, 5, 3, and 3 citations, then the
index is 3 because the fourth paper has only 3 citations.
If we have the function f ordered in decreasing order from the largest
value to the lowest one, we can compute the h-index as follows:
The Hirsch index is analogous to the
Eddington number, an earlier metric used for evaluating cyclists.
The h-index serves as an alternative to more traditional journal impact factor metrics in the evaluation of the impact of the work of a particular researcher. Because only the most highly cited articles contribute to the h-index, its determination is a simpler process. Hirsch has demonstrated that h has high predictive value for whether a scientist has won honors like National Academy membership or the Nobel Prize. The h-index grows as citations accumulate and thus it depends on the "academic age" of a researcher.

Input data

The h-index can be manually determined by using citation databases or using automatic tools. Subscription-based databases such as Scopus and the Web of Science provide automated calculators. From July 2011 Google have provided an automatically-calculated h-index and i10-index within their own Google Scholar profile. In addition, specific databases, such as the INSPIRE-HEP database can automatically calculate the h-index for researchers working in high energy physics.
Each database is likely to produce a different h for the same scholar, because of different coverage. A detailed study showed that the Web of Science has strong coverage of journal publications, but poor coverage of high impact conferences. Scopus has better coverage of conferences, but poor coverage of publications prior to 1996; Google Scholar has the best coverage of conferences and most journals, but like Scopus has limited coverage of pre-1990 publications. The exclusion of conference proceedings papers is a particular problem for scholars in computer science, where conference proceedings are considered an important part of the literature. Google Scholar has been criticized for producing "phantom citations," including gray literature in its citation counts, and failing to follow the rules of Boolean logic when combining search terms. For example, the Meho and Yang study found that Google Scholar identified 53% more citations than Web of Science and Scopus combined, but noted that because most of the additional citations reported by Google Scholar were from low-impact journals or conference proceedings, they did not significantly alter the relative ranking of the individuals. It has been suggested that in order to deal with the sometimes wide variation in h for a single academic measured across the possible citation databases, one should assume false negatives in the databases are more problematic than false positives and take the maximum h measured for an academic.

Comparing results across fields and career levels

Little systematic investigation has been done on how the h-index behaves over different institutions, nations, times and academic fields. Hirsch suggested that, for physicists, a value for h of about 12 might be typical for advancement to tenure at major research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship, 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences. Hirsch estimated that after 20 years a "successful scientist" would have an h-index of 20, an "outstanding scientist" would have an h-index of 40, and a "truly unique" individual would have an h-index of 60.
For the most highly cited scientists in the period 1983–2002, Hirsch identified the top 10 in the life sciences : Solomon H. Snyder, h = 191; David Baltimore, h = 160; Robert C. Gallo, h = 154; Pierre Chambon, h = 153; Bert Vogelstein, h = 151; Salvador Moncada, h = 143; Charles A. Dinarello, h = 138; Tadamitsu Kishimoto, h = 134; Ronald M. Evans, h = 127; Axel Ullrich, h = 120; and Ralph L. Brinster, h = 120. Among 36 new inductees in the National Academy of Sciences in biological and biomedical sciences in 2005, the median h-index was 57. However, Hirsch noted that values of h will vary between different fields.
Among the 22 scientific disciplines listed in the Essential Science Indicators citation thresholds , physics has the second most citations after space science. During the period January 1, 2000 – February 28, 2010, a physicist had to receive 2073 citations to be among the most cited 1% of physicists in the world. The threshold for space science is the highest, and physics is followed by clinical medicine and molecular biology & genetics. Most disciplines, such as environment/ecology, have fewer scientists, fewer papers, and fewer citations. Therefore, these disciplines have lower citation thresholds in the Essential Science Indicators, with the lowest citation thresholds observed in social sciences, computer science, and multidisciplinary sciences.
Numbers are very different in social science disciplines: The Impact of the Social Sciences team at London School of Economics found that social scientists in the United Kingdom had lower average h-indices. The h-indices for professors, based on Google Scholar data ranged from 2.8, through 3.4, 3.7, 6.5 and 7.6. On average across the disciplines, a professor in the social sciences had an h-index about twice that of a lecturer or a senior lecturer, though the difference was the smallest in geography.

Advantages

Hirsch intended the h-index to address the main disadvantages of other bibliometric indicators, such as total number of papers or total number of citations. Total number of papers does not account for the quality of scientific publications, while total number of citations can be disproportionately affected by participation in a single publication of major influence, or having many publications with few citations each. The h-index is intended to measure simultaneously the quality and quantity of scientific output.

Criticism

There are a number of situations in which h may provide misleading information about a scientist's output: Most of these however are not exclusive to the h-index.
Various proposals to modify the h-index in order to emphasize different features have been made. As the variants have proliferated, comparative studies have become possible showing that most proposals are highly correlated with the original h-index and therefore largely redundant, although alternative indexes may be important to decide between comparable CVs, as often the case in evaluation processes.
Indices similar to the h-index have been applied outside of author level metrics.
The h-index has been applied to Internet Media, such as YouTube channels. It is defined as the number of videos with ≥ h × 105 views. When compared with a video creator's total view count, the h-index and g-index better capture both productivity and impact in a single metric.
A successive Hirsch-type-index for institutions has also been devised. A scientific institution has a successive Hirsch-type-index of i when at least i researchers from that institution have an h-index of at least i.