The inconsistency of the h-index
By Ludo Waltman, Nees Jan van Eck. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2011
349 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The h-index is a popular bibliometric indicator for assessing individual scientists. We criticize the h-index from a theoretical point of view. We argue that for the purpose of measuring the overall scientific impact of a scientist (or some other unit of analysis), the h-index behaves in a counterintuitive way. In certain cases, the mechanism used by the h-index to aggregate publication and citation statistics into a single number leads to inconsistencies in the way in which scientists are ranked. Our conclusion is that the h-index cannot be considered an appropriate indicator of a scientist's overall scientific impact. Based on recent theoretical insights, we discuss what kind of indicators can be used as an alternative to the h-index. We pay special attention to the highly cited publications indicator. This indicator has a lot in common with the h-index, but unlike the h-index it does not produce inconsistent rankings. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Subfields: History and Philosophy of Science, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/66dfb34480d7c5f4b204c744aef6a0b9c4512eef
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In History and Philosophy of Science
In Statistics and Probability
- Jia-lin Hou
- Xiucai Yang
- Chaomei Chen
- Anthony F. J. van Raan
- Loet Leydesdorff
- Ludo Waltman
- Nees Jan van Eck
- John C. Mingers
Citations in the corpus
- Advances in bibliometric analysis: research performance assessment and science mapping (2014, background): “This approach is particularly important for bibliometric analysis in the social sciences and humanities [3].”
- Emerging trends and new developments in information science: a document co-citation analysis (2009–2016) (2018, methodology): “This selection method was first used by White and McCain (1998). Using the 53 titles listed by the Journal Citation Report for the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) in the category ‘‘Information Science and Library Science’’ in 1993, they selected 12 core IS journals to define this specialty.”
- Bibliometrics: Methods for studying academic publishing (2021, background): “This limitation has been well documented, in particular when it comes to metrics for measuring research output like the h-Index or journal impact factor [6, 23, 24].”