The H Index in Perspective

Viva the h-index

In their article ‘The inconsistency of the h-index’ Ludo Waltman and Nees Jan van Neck give three examples to demonstrate the inconsistency of the h-index. As will be shown below, a little extension of their examples just illustrate the opposite, a stable feature of the h-index. For starting authors it, the h-index that is, focusses on the number of articles; for experienced authors its focus s...

Socializing the h-index

A variety of bibliometric measures have been proposed to quantify the impact of researchers and their work. The h-index is a notable and widely-used example which aims to improve over simple metrics such as raw counts of papers or citations. However, a limitation of this measure is that it considers authors in isolation and does not account for contributions through a collaborative team. To add...

Dynamic h-index: The Hirsch index in function of time

The h-index in Australian Astronomy

The Hirsch (2005) h-index is now widely used as a metric to compare individual researchers. To evaluate it in the context of Australian Astronomy, the h-index for every member of the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) is found using NASA’s Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services (ADS). Percentiles of the h-index distribution are detailed for a variety of categories of ASA members, ...

The h’-Index, Effectively Improving the h-Index Based on the Citation Distribution

BACKGROUND Although being a simple and effective index that has been widely used to evaluate academic output of scientists, the h-index suffers from drawbacks. One critical disadvantage is that only h-squared citations can be inferred from the h-index, which completely ignores excess and h-tail citations, leading to unfair and inaccurate evaluations in many cases. METHODOLOGY PRINCIPAL FINDIN...