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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.

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  • v.12(11); 2023 Nov
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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.

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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 .

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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.

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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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Reference management. Clean and simple.

What is the h-index?

Academic career and 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.

Plotting citation count of papers to calculate the h-index

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.

Tips for proofreading your thesis

Boston College Libraries homepage

  • 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.

H-Index chart

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:

H-index 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:

merged row indication in interface

  • 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* .

screen shot

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.

H-index for S. Helluy

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

bar charts of published items

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.

h-index across selected 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.

Publish or Perish interface

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Articles Web of Science: h-index information

Web of science: h-index information, jun 9, 2022 • knowledge, information.

The h-index was developed by J.E. Hirsch and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (46): 16569-16572 November 15 2005. It reflects the productivity of authors based on their publication and citation records.

The h-index is based on a list of publications ranked in descending order by the Times Cited. The value of h is equal to the number of papers (N) in the list that have N or more citations. This metric is useful because it discounts the disproportionate weight of highly cited papers or papers that have not yet been cited. 

Advantages:  The h-index reflects not just the number of papers, or the number of citations; it has some indication of the number of well-cited papers. This provides an interesting complement to other performance metrics, since it is not influenced by a single highly-cited paper.

Disadvantages:  The h-index, like any other citation-based metric, is dependent on the subject area considered, as well on as the time since publication of important works. The h-index in the Citation Report reflects citations as of the most recent database update, so it could vary upon subsequent analyses.

Calculating:  A researcher (or a set of papers) has an h-index of N if he/she has published N papers that have N or more citations each. The h-index is based on Times Cited data from the database. It will not include citations from non-indexed resources. The h-index is based on the depth of the user's subscription and the selected timespan, in that certain items may not be retrieved based on those parameters.  Any record that is retrieved will include all of the Times Cited for the article, whether or not the user has a subscription to all of the citing articles.

Factors to consider:  As with all metrics based on citation, h-index will vary by such factors as: time, subject area, and the number of papers. Users should be careful to make appropriate comparisons such as comparing h-indexes within similar types of searches and/or similar subject areas.

Find benchmark h-indices:  Because the h-index can be determined for any population of articles, it is difficult to provide overall benchmarks for the value of the h-index. Very productive researchers in subject areas with high volumes of publication and citation can show h-index values over 100 at the peak of their scientific careers. Newer researchers in smaller subject areas can have h-indexes under 10.

Currently, Web of Science has a limit of 10,000 records that can be used to generate a Citation Report. To calculate an h-index using the result set, perform the following steps:

1. From the Results page, sort the result list by Times Cited -- highest to lowest by using the “Sort by:” box on the right hand side of the screen. 2. Find the record with the same number of Times Cited as the number of the record in the list. For instance if record #19 has a 19 Times Cited count, the h-index will be 19. If no record number has an equal Times Cited count, the last record number with a Times Cited count greater than the record number will be the h-index. For instance, if record number 62 has a 63 Times Cited count, and record 63 has a Times Cited count of 60, the h-index will be 62. 

Manual process for adding citations to the h-index

Incorrect citations and non-source citations would not be included in the Citation Report counts and the H index, because they will not have been linked to a specific source item in the set of papers being analyzed.  

The Citation Report uses all and only citations that are linked to the source record and accessible through the Times Cited link. Citations with incorrect or incomplete bibliographic data may not be linked, but you can see these records through the Cited Reference Search feature to determine if they would contribute significantly to the citation count.

Additional data from cited reference searches specific to all the source papers can be added to the output of the Citation Report to create highly accurate citation metrics, including the h-index. For most cases, there will be little or no variance in the h-index, but you may want to test several researcher records and draw your own conclusion regarding the methodology. Do keep in mind that h-index for researchers who are still actively publishing can change as updates are loaded.

To manually add citations to the h-index, choose the Save to Excel File option under Export Data on the Citation Report screen to import the data into Excel. Be sure to change the "number of records" to reflect the entire set or desired number or you will just get the default of 10 records.

Then, starting with the most-cited articles, add in additional citations from your Cited Reference Search Index display until you have reached the h-index inflection point (where the rank-count of the paper exceeds the citation count for that paper). You can add in an entire row for non-source items which are not included, or edit the Times Cited number in existing rows to include cited references that were missed due to data errors. Continue the cited reference search for the next paper to see if this would alter the h-index - if so, move down the list until you have crossed the h-index inflection. If not, a spot check of some of the papers below the h-index cut-off would offer additional reassurance that there are not missing citations that could further alter the h-index.

Bob Wilson

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Title: the h-index.

Abstract: The h-index is a mainstream bibliometric indicator, since it is widely used in academia, research management and research policy. While its advantages have been highlighted, such as its simple calculation, it has also received widespread criticism. The criticism is mainly based on the negative effects it may have on scholars, when the index is used to describe the quality of a scholar. The "h" means "highly-cited" and "high achievement", and should not be confused with the last name of its inventor, Hirsch. Put simply, the h-index combines a measure of quantity and impact in a single indicator. Several initiatives try to provide alternatives to the h-index to counter some of its shortcomings.

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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.

Table illustrates previous example. Column 1 shows articles 1-8 and column 2 shows citation numbers. Article 6 has 6 citations

  • 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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  • Last Updated: Oct 5, 2023 7:37 AM
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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: 392893

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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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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What is a good H-index for each academic position?

Navigating the complex landscape of academia often involves decoding a series of metrics and benchmarks.

Among these, the h-index stands out as a critical measure of a scholar’s productivity and influence.

But what exactly constitutes a “good” h-index? And how does it vary across different academic positions and disciplines—from PhD students to full professors in fields as diverse as Life Sciences, Engineering, and Humanities?

On average and good H-index for a PhD student is between 1 and 5, a postdoc between 2 and 17, an assistant professor between 4 – 35 and a full professor typically about 30+.

Our comprehensive blog delves into the nuances of the h-index, its relevance in academic promotions, and the challenges it presents. 

Here is a quick summary of h-indexes that could be considered typical in different fields:

research paper of h index

What is the h-index metric?

The h-index is a metric designed to quantify the productivity and impact of a researcher, and increasingly, groups or journals.

Developed by physicist Jorge Hirsch, this index is computed as the number of papers (number of publications) with citation numbers larger or equal to ‘h.’

For instance, if a researcher has four papers cited at least four times each, their h-index is 4.

The metric comes in handy when comparing scholars within the same field but has limitations when used across disciplines. This is due to factors such as the average number of references per paper, the typical productivity of researchers in the field, and the field’s overall size.

Several databases, like Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus, offer h-index calculations. However, it’s crucial to note that your h-index may vary between platforms due to differences in their database’s scope and what papers they include.

The h-index has become a crucial factor in academia for promotions, with assistant professors often striving for a ‘good h-index’ to become a full professor.

The h-index is not without its challenges:

  • it may not accurately reflect the impact of scholars with fewer but highly cited publications. In such cases, the h-index may paint an incomplete picture of an author’s impact, favoring those who publish more frequently regardless of the quality or impact of their work.
  • it is heavily influenced by the field’s norms. For example, in disciplines where papers usually have fewer citations, even established researchers may have a relatively low h-index.

Despite its limitations, the h-index remains a widely-used metric for assessing the influence and productivity of researchers, offering a more nuanced picture than simply counting the number of papers published or the number of citations.

How to calculate your h-index score

Calculating your h-index is a straightforward process, especially if you use academic databases that track citations. Here’s a simple step-by-step guide:

Manual Calculation

  • List Your Publications : Make a list of all your academic publications that have been cited.
  • Count Citations : For each publication, find out the number of times it has been cited. You can use Google Scholar, Web of Science, or Scopus for this, or you can manually check academic journals.
  • Sort by Citation Count : Arrange the list of publications in descending order based on the number of citations each paper has received.
  • Find the H-Index : Start from the top of the sorted list and look for the last publication where the number of citations is greater than or equal to the position in the sorted list. That position number is your h-index.

For example, if you have papers cited 10, 8, 5, 4, and 2 times, then your h-index would be 4 because you have 4 papers that have been cited at least 4 times.

Using Google Scholar

  • Create/Log into Account : Go to Google Scholar and create an account if you haven’t. If you already have one, log in.
  • Add Publications : You’ll be prompted to add your publications to your Google Scholar profile.
  • View H-Index : Once your publications are added, Google Scholar automatically calculates your h-index and displays it on your profile.

Using Web of Science

  • Access the Database : Go to Web of Science and log in or access it via your institution.
  • Search for Author : Search for your name in the author search.
  • Check H-Index : Your h-index will be displayed along with other citation metrics.

Using Scopus

  • Access and Search : Go to Scopus and use the author search to find your profile.
  • Locate H-Index : Your profile will display your h-index along with other metrics.

Calculating your h-index is an essential part of understanding your academic impact, and these steps should help you determine yours.

What is a good h-index for a PhD student?

determining what constitutes a “good” h-index for a Ph.D. student can vary greatly depending on the academic field, the number of years the student has been in the program, and other factors like collaborative work and the prominence of the journals where they’ve published.

Here’s a table that attempts to provide some generalized benchmarks:

It’s worth noting that while a “good” h-index can be indicative of a productive and impactful research career, it’s not the only metric to consider. Quality of research, contribution to the field, and other factors like teaching and community service are also important.

What is a good h-index for a Postdoc?

A “good” h-index for a Postdoc will typically be higher than for a PhD student, given the additional years of research and publications.

Again, the numbers can vary depending on the field, the productivity of the researcher, and other variables like the rate of collaboration and the types of journals in which they’ve published.

Here’s a generalized table:

Remember that while the h-index is a useful metric, it’s not the end-all measure of academic success. Qualities like the impact and innovation of one’s research, mentorship, and broader contributions to science and the academic community are also vital aspects of a successful Postdoc experience.

What’s a good h-index for an assistant professor academic position?

The h-index for an Assistant Professor would usually be higher than for a PhD student or Postdoc due to more years of research and publications.

Like in previous cases, the “good” h-index varies significantly based on academic field, years in the role, and other variables such as the type of institution, rate of collaboration, and types of journals in which the researcher has published.

It’s worth mentioning that although a “good” h-index is beneficial for career advancement, including promotions to Associate or Full Professor roles, it’s not the only metric of importance.

Peer review, teaching effectiveness, and service to the academic community are also critical factors in evaluating an Assistant Professor’s performance.

What is a good h-index for an associate professor?

The h-index for an Associate Professor would typically be higher still, given the further years of research and publishing, as well as the likelihood of having guided PhD students and Postdocs, which often results in collaborative publications.

Again, while a strong h-index is beneficial for career advancement and often required for promotion to Full Professor, it is not the sole indicator of academic success.

Qualities like innovative research, excellence in teaching, and meaningful service to the academic community are also critical in evaluating an Associate Professor’s overall performance.

H-index required for an academic position – Full professor? 

A Full Professor is generally expected to have a high h-index, reflecting a long career with significant contributions to research.

It’s important to recognize that the h-index will vary by academic field and will often be influenced by a range of factors such as international collaborations, research funding, and the impact factor of journals where the work is published.

Here’s a generalized table for what might be considered a “good” h-index for a Full Professor:

A Full Professor’s career is also evaluated based on other achievements, such as securing research grants, publishing influential works beyond journal articles, mentorship, administrative roles, and service to the academic and broader community.

Wrapping up – what h-index is considered good?

The quest to quantify academic productivity and influence has led to the widespread adoption of the h-index as an evaluative metric.

While this index offers a useful, albeit simplified, snapshot of a researcher’s impact, it’s crucial to understand its nuances and limitations.

Notably, what constitutes a “good” h-index can vary dramatically depending on several factors, including the academic discipline, stage of career, and other variables such as types of publications and rate of collaboration.

This blog has provided a comprehensive guide to the h-index, outlining its significance, methodology for calculation, and what might be considered typical scores across various academic stages and fields.

The h-index should not be viewed in isolation.

Other qualitative factors like the quality of research, peer review, teaching effectiveness, and service to the academic community are equally vital in evaluating an academic’s overall performance.

The h-index faces challenges such as not accounting for the quality or societal impact of a researcher’s work and not translating well across different disciplines.

As a result, while the h-index can serve as a useful tool in academic evaluations, it should be used in conjunction with other metrics and qualitative assessments for a more rounded understanding of a scholar’s contributions.

So, whether you are a PhD student or a full professor, it’s important to not only be aware of your h-index but also to engage in a broader reflection of your academic goals and contributions. 

research paper of h index

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research paper of h index

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research paper of h index

Four problems of the h -index for assessing the research productivity and impact of individual authors

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  • Published: 12 March 2022
  • Volume 128 , pages 2677–2691, ( 2023 )

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A Correction to this article was published on 25 February 2023

A Correction to this article was published on 14 July 2022

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This paper reveals that when the h -index is used to assess the research productivity and impact of individual authors, four major problems exist because the h -index does not take into account the number of authors in each publication. This paper shows that the fractional h -index (or the individual h i -index in this paper), which distributes each publication’s received citations among its authors, can solve these problems effectively. This paper recommends that websites (such as scholar.google.com and researchgate.net) should add the h i -index for the sake of building a fairer and more ethical research community.

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Problems of using the h -index to assess the research productivity and impact of authors

The h -index (Hirsch, 2005 ) has been widely used to assess the productivity and impact of journals (such as www.scimagojr.com) and authors (such as scholar.google.com and researchgate.net). Because a citation is a reference in a publication to another publication, it is appropriate to use the h -index to assess a journal’s productivity and impact based on its number of publications ( h ) that have received at least h citations each.

However, because the h -index does not take into account the number of authors in each publication (Schubert & Schubert, 2019 ), the following four problems exist in the research community when the h -index is used to assess each author’s research productivity and impact:

Problem #1–individually taking full credit for a multiauthored publication’s all contributions. A multiauthored publication is generated by intellectual contributions from multiple authors. Each citation cites a multiauthored publication as a whole, not each of its authors. When the number of all citations that a multiauthored publication has received is used in computing an individual author’s h -index, it means that this author takes full credit for this publication’s all contributions (including those from other authors), which is fundamentally and ethically improper.

Problem #2–creating inflation in counting citations. When the h -index is used to assess the research productivity and impact of authors, it also creates a problem of “inflation in counting citations”. For instance, suppose that a three-authored publication has received 60 citations. If each of these three authors credits this publication’s all 60 citations to herself or himself when computing her or his h -index, then these 60 citations will be redundantly counted three times on these authors’ separate webpages (e.g., scholar.google.com). This generates totally 180 citation counts by these three authors, thus inappropriately inflating their research productivity and impact from one publication.

Here is an example from Google Scholar Footnote 1 : The publication “Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)” had 10,477 citations as of December 18, 2021. This publication has 2931 authors. Footnote 2 If Google Scholar would list this publication’s 10,477 citations on the webpage of each of those 2931 authors, then each author would have over 10,000 citations on Google Scholar, and Google Scholar would redundantly generate enormous 30,708,087 citation counts in total from this publication to drastically exaggerate research productivity in the research community.

Problem #3–creating unfairness in evaluating research contributions. Each coauthor makes a partial contribution to a multiauthored publication. Because the h -index does not take into account the number of authors in publications, the h -index is computed by ignoring the difference between partial contributions in multiauthored publications and full contributions in single-authored publications, thus creating unfairness in assessing research contributions.

Problem #4–driving the unethical behavior of gift authorship. The h -index has been used for decision-making on appointments, promotion and tenure, etc. Its popularity and importance may drive some people to unethically increase their h -index through gift authorship. Because the h -index does not take the number of authors in each publication into account, some people may add each other’s names to the author lists of publications, in which they have no or little contributions, to unethically boost their h -index.

Solution: taking the number of authors in each publication into account

Although many variants of the h -index have been proposed (Alonso et al., 2009 ; Batista et al., 2006 ; Hirsch, 2019 ; Schreiber, 2008a , b ; Schubert & Schubert, 2019 ; Todeschini & Baccini, 2016 ), the h -index is still widely used for two reasons: it is easy to understand, compute, and interpret by almost all users to evaluate their research productivity and impact; it can be used across different disciplines, different types of publications, etc.

Assessing the research productivity and impact of individual authors more accurately

Among the proposed variants of the h -index, “the fractional h -index” has taken into account the number of authors in publications by “giving an author of an m -authored paper only a credit of \(\frac{c}{m}\) if the paper received c citations” (Egghe, 2008 ). This paper renames “the fractional h -index” to “the h i -index”; one reason is that although a fractional number of citations that each multiauthored publication has received are used to compute each author’s h i -index, the subscript “ i ” is used to emphasize the individual contributions in publications that each author should be accredited. Note that this paper does not propose any new variant of the h -index, but attempts to use the h i -index (i.e., the fractional h -index) to address the aforementioned four problems.

Note that the h i -index is different from the h I -index (Batista et al., 2006 ), the h m -index (Schreiber, 2008a , b ), and the h α index (Hirsch, 2019 ). The h I -index is obtained by dividing “ h by the mean number of researchers in the h publications” (Batista et al., 2006 ); the h I -index “disfavours people with some papers with a large number of co-authors” (Schreiber, 2008a ). The h m -index is determined by comparing “an effective rank” with the number of citations that publications have received (Schreiber, 2008a , b ); it seems more difficult for users (especially non-technical users) to interpret their research productivity and impact by using “an effective rank” than by directly using the number of citations that publications have received. The h α index is proposed as “a measure of the scientific production of a scientist that counts only those papers where the scientist is the leading author”, with an assumption that “the coauthor with the highest h -index is the most likely” leading author in a multiauthored publication (Hirsch, 2019 ); in reality, however, this assumption is questionable for many publications.

To discuss how the h i -index can address the aforementioned four problems, it is necessary to first explain how it works:

The h i -index is used to assess the research productivity and impact of individual authors. For an author who has published k publications in total, the author’s h i -index is defined as the maximum value of n such that the author has n publications, each of which has \(\frac{{c_{j} }}{{m_{j} }} \ge n\) , where the j th publication has m j authors and has received c j citations ( c j  ≥ 1, m j  ≥ 1, 1 ≤  j  ≤  k , 1 ≤  n  ≤  k ), or is 0 if each publication has \(\frac{{c_{j} }}{{m_{j} }}\)  < 1 ( c j  ≥ 0, m j  ≥ 1, 1 ≤  j  ≤  k ).

When computing the h i -index, it is recommended that if the percentages of contributions from the authors to a publication are known, then these percentages should be used to distribute the number of citations that the publication has received among the authors (Tscharntke et al., 2007 ); otherwise, the computation of the h i -index assumes equal contributions from the authors by default.

Mathematically, suppose that an author has k publications in total, and these k publications have m 1 , m 2 , …, m k ( m j ≥ 1, 1 ≤  j  ≤  k ) authors and have received c 1 , c 2 , …, c k ( c j ≥ 0, 1 ≤  j  ≤  k ) citations, respectively;

for each publication, let f be the function that corresponds to the number of citations per author, i.e., \(f(j) = \frac{{c_{j} }}{{m_{j} }}\) (1 ≤  j  ≤  k );

for k publications, if the values of \(f(j) = \frac{{c_{j} }}{{m_{j} }}\) (1 ≤  j  ≤  k ) are ordered in descending order (i.e., the highest value f (1) in the 1st position and the lowest value f ( k ) in the k th position), then the h i -index is computed as follows:

h i -index ( f ) =  \(\left\{ {\begin{array}{*{20}l} {\max \{ j \in {\mathbb{N}}: \, 1 \le j \le k, \, \left\lfloor {f(j)} \right\rfloor \ge j\} \, if \, f(1) \ge 1} \hfill \\ {0 \, if \, f(1) < 1} \hfill \\ \end{array} } \right.\) , where \(\left\lfloor \cdot \right\rfloor\) is the floor function.

As an illustrative example to compare the h -index and the h i -index, Table 1 shows the number of citations ( c j ) and the number of authors ( m j , in parentheses) of an author’s 15 publications (i.e., k  = 15). According to Table 1 , this author’s h -index = 9 based on the publications highlighted in bold. Next, Table 2 calculates the division \(f(j) = \frac{{c_{j} }}{{m_{j} }}\) for each publication. Then, Table 3 reorders the values of \(f(j)\) in Table 2 from high to low, along with the corresponding publications. According to Table 3 , this author’s h i -index = 7 based on the publications highlighted in bold.

Here are two insightful observations from this example. First , publication #11 does not contribute to the h -index = 9 in Table 1 , but it contributes to the h i -index = 7 in Table 3 . It is a single-authored publication. Because #11’s all citations are accredited to this single author’s intellectual contribution, it makes sense that #11 boosts this author’s individual h i -index.

Second , publications #4 and #5 contribute to the h -index = 9 in Table 1 , but they do not contribute to the h i -index = 7 in Table 3 . Although #4’s 37 citations and #5’s 34 citations are higher than most of the other publications in Table 1 , these two publications have the highest numbers of authors among all publications. Having a relatively large number of coauthors probably implies that this author’s contributions in these two publications are relatively small, and thus it makes sense that #4 and #5 do not contribute to increasing this author’s individual h i -index in Table 3 .

Solving the four problems

The aforementioned four problems can be effectively addressed by using the h i -index: The h i -index prevents each author from taking full credit for a multiauthored publication’s all contributions (Problem #1). The h i -index eliminates inflation in counting citations, because it ensures that the portions of a publication’s received citations distributed among its authors will add up to its total number of received citations (Problem #2). By taking a publication’s all authors into account when assessing their contributions to the publication, the h i -index promotes fairness in assessing the research contributions of authors (Problem #3).

To discuss how the h i -index addresses Problem #4, assume that one more person was added to Publication #7 in Table 1 through gift authorship; that is, it had 4 authors and received 25 citations, yielding \(\frac{{c_{7} }}{{m_{7} }} = \frac{25}{4} = 6.25\) . This change does not affect the h -index in Table 1 , but reduces the h i -index from 7 to 6 in Table 3 . In general, adding more people to a publication’s author list through gift authorship will slow down this publication’s potential contribution to each author’s h i -index. The h i -index can make it difficult to “inflate results with coauthorship of documents for reasons other than good scientific performance” (Vieira & Gomes, 2011 ). Due to this effect, the use of the h i -index will discourage authors from adding people with no or little research contributions to their publications, and thus can effectively curb the unethical practice of gift authorship.

From the h -index to the h i -index

Potential impact and causes.

To study how the change from the h -index to the h i -index may potentially impact authors in different fields, this paper compares the h -index and the h i -index of 12 Nobel laureates in four scientific fields. As shown in Table 4 , the citation data of three Nobel laureates in each field are obtained from the Google Scholar webpages.

For each author in Table 4 , (1) =  \(\sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^{k} {c_{j} }\) , (2) =  \(\sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^{k} {\frac{{c_{j} }}{{m_{j} }}}\) , (3) =  \(\frac{{\sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^{k} {\frac{{c_{j} }}{{m_{j} }}} }}{{\sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^{k} {c_{j} } }} \times 100\%\) , (6) =  \(\frac{{h - {\text{index }} - \, h_{i} - {\text{index}}}}{{h - {\text{index}}}} \times 100\%\) , (7) =   \(\frac{{\sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^{k} {m_{j} } }}{k}\) , and (8) =  \(\sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^{k} {c_{j} m_{j} }\) , where the author has k cited publications, and the j th publication has m j authors and has received c j citations ( c j  ≥ 1, m j  ≥ 1, 1 ≤  j  ≤  k ).

Column (8) in Table 4 shows that if the citations in column (1) would be redundantly counted for each author listed in these publications, then Google Scholar would generate much higher total citation counts for all authors. Such huge inflation in counting citations may create misleading impressions of research productivity and impact in the research community.

Based on the data in Table 4 , Fig.  1 shows that for these four scientific fields, the authors in Economic Sciences (i.e., E1, E2, and E3) generally have lower average numbers of authors per cited publication; the authors in Physiology or Medicine (i.e., M1, M2, and M3) generally have higher average numbers of authors per cited publication; however, P2 has the highest average number of authors per cited publication. Figure  1 reveals that different fields, as well as different research areas within the same field (e.g., physics), may have different practices of research collaboration and publication.

figure 1

The relationship between Table 4 ’s column (6) (in blue) and columns (3) (in green) and (7) (in red)

Although Fig.  1 does not show a simple linear relationship between the blue bars and the red line or the green line, it shows that in general, when the average number of authors per cited publication becomes smaller, or when the percentage of an author’s fractional number of citations becomes larger, the author’s percentage decrease from the h -index to the h i -index becomes smaller.

Based on the data in Table 4 , Table 5 shows the rankings of 12 authors when the h -index is used; Table 6 shows how their rankings change when the h i -index is used instead of the h -index.

There are a few observations from the analysis of these 12 authors in four research fields. First , the rankings of the authors from different fields are all mixed in both Table 5 and Table 6 ; no field is ranked definitely higher or lower than all other fields based on the h -index or the h i -index. Second , when the h i -index is used instead of the h -index, the rankings of all three authors in Economic Sciences are increased (see Table 6 ); this is probably because these three authors have lower average numbers of authors per cited publication than the authors in the other three fields (see Fig.  1 ). Lastly , when the h i -index is used instead of the h -index (see Table 6 ), for each field other than Economic Sciences, some authors’ rankings are increased while some authors’ rankings are decreased; the rankings of M1 and P1 remain unchanged. These observations reveal that changing from the h -index to the h i -index may have different impacts on the rankings of authors in different fields or in different research areas within the same field.

Determining the percentages of partial contributions of coauthors

To calculate an author’s h i -index, it is necessary to determine the author’s percentage of contributions in each multiauthored publication. This paper considers the following two methods:

The first method is that the authors disclose the percentages of their respective contributions in a multiauthored publication. Because different fields may have different practices of research collaboration and publication, it should be the authors who decide their publication’s author list. In general, any individuals who have contributed significantly to a publication should be individually named in the author list. When the authors decide the author list and the order of their names, they typically have some sense about their respective contributions. It is thus possible to estimate such sense into certain percentages of contributions, which sum to 100% for each publication.

The second method is to assume equal contributions from coauthors. When the authors do not disclose the percentages of their respective contributions in a multiauthored publication, this method is desirable for a few reasons: First , because different fields may have different practices of determining the author list, the contributions of authors, the order of authors, etc., this second method practically simplifies and standardizes the implementation of the h i -index across all fields. Second , this method does not force the authors to fight over agreeing on the percentages of their respective contributions in a multiauthored publication, thus encouraging productive research collaboration. Lastly , a prior study showed that for overcoming the h -index’s problem of ignoring the number of authors in each publication, the improvement of the authorship-weighted methods (e.g., first-author-emphasis, corresponding-author-emphasis) compared to the equal-contribution method “is not as high as one would expect” (Vavryčuk, 2018 ). It is also worth mentioning that while the authorship-weighted methods “may be very useful as applied to a particular field or discipline, they cannot be used across the board because of the very different practices in different disciplines regarding order of authors, significance of authorship position in the author’s list, etc.” (Hirsch, 2019 ).

For calculating the h i -index, this paper recommends that if the authors disclose the percentages of their respective contributions in a multiauthored publication, then these percentages should be used for allocating the publication’s received citations among its authors; if the authors do not disclose the percentages of their respective contributions in a publication, then the second method can be used. The second method achieves a good balance of overcoming the h -index’s problem of ignoring the number of authors in each publication, making the h i -index implementable across different fields, encouraging productive research collaboration among coauthors, and keeping it easy for authors to interpret their research productivity and impact in a straightforward way based on the number of citations that each publication has received.

Discussion and conclusion

This paper revealed that because the h -index does not take into account the number of authors in each publication, four major problems exist when the h -index is used to assess the research productivity and impact of authors: individually taking full credit for a multiauthored publication’s all contributions, creating inflation in counting citations, creating unfairness in evaluating research contributions, and driving the unethical behavior of gift authorship. This paper showed that the h i -index (i.e., the fractional h -index), which distributes each publication’s received citations among its authors, can help solve these four problems effectively.

The h i -index has several advantages. First , the h i -index assesses each author’s research productivity and impact more accurately and fairly than the h -index. Second , like the original h -index, the h i -index is still easy to understand, compute, and interpret by almost all users (including non-technical users) in comparison with many other variants of the h -index such as the h I -index and the h m -index. Lastly , the h i -index can be used across different disciplines, different types of publications, etc.

This paper used the Google Scholar data of 12 Nobel laureates in four scientific fields to show what happens when the h i -index is used instead of the h -index. These examples demonstrated that the existing h -index drastically exaggerates research productivity and impact. In addition, these examples showed that the percentage decreases from the h -index to the h i -index are generally smaller for the authors whose average number of authors per publication is smaller (or whose portions of contributions to publications are larger). This finding provides a useful implication that the use of the h i -index can potentially motivate more effort to make research contributions.

Although software has been developed for authors to install and compute their own h i -index, such as Publish or Perish (Harzing 2021 ), the h i -index (i.e., the fractional h -index) is still not widely used. This is probably because nowadays, most authors rely on websites where they can find their h -index instantly. Therefore, this paper recommends that websites (such as scholar.google.com and researchgate.net) should add the h i -index for the sake of building a fairer and more ethical research community, assessing each author’s research productivity and impact more accurately, and encouraging more contributions to research and publication.

Change history

25 february 2023.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04665-x

14 July 2022

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04455-x

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Bi, H.H. Four problems of the h -index for assessing the research productivity and impact of individual authors. Scientometrics 128 , 2677–2691 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04323-8

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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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IMAGES

  1. Author Metrics (including h-index)

    research paper of h index

  2. (PDF) The Concept of H-Index

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  3. (PDF) What is an H-index? What is an H-index ? Everything about the H

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  4. What is an H-index?

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  5. The h-Index: A Helpful Guide for Scientists

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  6. Learn how to calculate your h-index using Web of Science

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COMMENTS

  1. What is a good 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).

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

    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.

  3. What is a good h-index? [with examples]

    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.

  4. The ultimate how-to-guide on the h-index

    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.

  5. h-index

    The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The h -index correlates with success indicators such as winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. [1]

  6. An entropy-based measure for the evolution of h index research

    The h index has been comprehensively developed and diffusely applied following its initial proposal in 2005 by Jorge Hirsch. However, while the numbers of papers and authors measured continue to grow, it is not known whether such increases in quantity mean that the research itself is advancing. Accordingly, the present study sets out to establish an analysis method, based on the concept of ...

  7. Finding an Author's H-Index

    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.

  8. Web of Science: h-index information

    Calculating: A researcher (or a set of papers) has an h-index of N if he/she has published N papers that have N or more citations each. The h-index is based on Times Cited data from the database. It will not include citations from non-indexed resources.

  9. Promoting research: why, how, indices h-index, m-index, etc

    2. To compare applicants eligible for a promotion. 3. To find eligible candidates for research grant. Scientific indices: Most commonly discussed indexes are h -index, g -index, AR -index, i 10-index, integrated impact indicator (I3), etc. h-index: It was described in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch to assess the productivity of an individual scientist ...

  10. [2112.02175] The h-index

    The h-index is a mainstream bibliometric indicator, since it is widely used in academia, research management and research policy. While its advantages have been highlighted, such as its simple calculation, it has also received widespread criticism. The criticism is mainly based on the negative effects it may have on scholars, when the index is used to describe the quality of a scholar. The "h ...

  11. Calculate Your Academic Footprint: 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. Useful For

  12. The state of h index research: Is the h index the ideal way to measure

    Hirsch's so‐called h index was proposed as an alternative to other bibliometric indicators—such as the number of publications, the average number of citations and the sum of all citations (Hirsch, 2007)—and is defined as follows: "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 − ...

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

    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.

  14. H-Index

    The h-index is a measure of publishing impact, where an author's h-index is represented by the number of papers (h) with a citation number ≥ h. For example, a scientist with an h-index of 14 has published numerous papers, 14 of which have been cited at least 14 times. Image: Screenshot of some metrics listed in an author profile in Michigan ...

  15. (PDF) The Concept of H-Index

    Abstract. In the present paper an attempt has been made to review the recent developments related to the h-index and the h-type indices. It describes the G-index. advantages and disadvantages of h ...

  16. Library Guides: Calculate your h-index: Using the h-index

    Library Guides For Researchers Calculate your h-index Using the h-index Calculate your h-index Using the h-index What is the h-index? Find your h-index Metrics, impact and engagement Use engagement of your research. Reusing content from this guide Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. What is the h-index?

  17. Measuring your research impact: H-Index

    Journal Impact Tracking and Measuring Your Impact Broadening your impact 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.

  18. The H-Index: good or bad?

    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.

  19. What is a good H-index for each academic position?

    The h-index is a metric designed to quantify the productivity and impact of a researcher, and increasingly, groups or journals. Developed by physicist Jorge Hirsch, this index is computed as the number of papers (number of publications) with citation numbers larger or equal to 'h.'

  20. Four problems of the h-index for assessing the research productivity

    This paper reveals that when the h-index is used to assess the research productivity and impact of individual authors, four major problems exist because the h-index does not take into account the number of authors in each publication. This paper shows that the fractional h-index (or the individual hi-index in this paper), which distributes each publication's received citations among its ...

  21. h-index

    The h-index is calculated based on two bits of information: the total number of papers published (Np) and the number of citations (Nc) for each paper. It is defined by how many h of a...

  22. LibGuides: Research metrics: Find Researcher Metrics (H-index)

    J. E. Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, proposed the h-index to quantify individuals' scientific research output in a 2005 PNAS paper. The h-index measures both productivity and citation impact. To calculate your h-index, list your papers based on the number of their citations, from most to least.

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

    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.

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