Does the h index have predictive power?

By Jorge E. Hirsch. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007

1,000 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bibliometric measures of individual scientific achievement are of particular interest if they can be used to predict future achievement. Here we report results of an empirical study of the predictive power of the h index compared with other indicators. Our findings indicate that the h index is better than other indicators considered (total citation count, citations per paper, and total paper count) in predicting future scientific achievement. We discuss reasons for the superiority of the h index.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6eb44ff21e89671a579057e79a1c450045a54707

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Citations in the corpus

Predicting Publication Success for Biologists (2013, background): “Further measures of research impact, such as personal citation rates and journal rankings, are also key indicators of academic success (Symonds 2004, Hirsch 2005, 2007, Acuna et al. 2012).”
Vital nodes identification in complex networks (2016, methodology): “H-index was originally used to measure the academic impacts of researchers or journals based on their publications and citations [40,69,70], which is defined as the maximum value h such that there exists at least h papers, each with citations no less than h [40,42].”
The e-Index, Complementing the h-Index for Excess Citations (2009, methodology): “The h -index, proposed by Hirsch [1,2], has already been used by major citation databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus, to evaluate the academic performance of individual scientists.”
Over-optimization of academic publishing metrics: observing Goodhart’s Law in action (2018, positive): “It has been shown that the h-index can predict academic achievements [57].”
The meaning of the h-index (2014, background): “I t hink a useful indicator should: (i) ref lect elements of realit y t hat are useful for evaluat ion and meaningful in a stat ist ical sense (there are always except ions to any criterion) and ideal ly have predict ive power (Hirsch, 2007), (ii) not lead to undesirable incent ives that are det rim”
How Does the Market Use Citation Data? The Hirsch Index in Economics (2013, neutral): “4 Other noteworthy papers in the literature include Hirsch ( 2007 ) , which compares the h -index and other measures ( including variants that place more weight on highly cited papers in terms of their ability to predict future success ( measured with the h -index and other ways , and Lehmann,…”
Library 2.0: A guide to participatory library service (2008, positive): “The h index can be used not only to determine the past productivity of a scientist, but it is also—as Hirsch (2007) ascertains in his most recent published study—better able than other bibliometric indicators to predict a scientist’s future productivity (Ball, 2007).”
The H-index of a network node and its relation to degree and coreness (2016, methodology): “This approach brings to mind the Hirsch index (also called the H-index) 27 , which was originally used to measure the citation impact of a scholar or a journal 27–29 .”
h-Index: A review focused in its variants, computation and standardization for different scientific fields (2009, methodology): “In later contribution, Hirsch (2007) conducted an empirical study in order to confirm that the h-index is better than other considered indicators (total citation count, citations per paper and total paper count) in predicting future scientific achievement.”
Reputation and impact in academic careers (2013, neutral): “[57] Hirsch JE (2007) Does the h index have predictive power.”
The science of science: from the perspective of complex systems (2017, background): “In an early work, Hirsch examined the correlation between authors’ current performance metrics and authors’ future h-index and find that the h-index itself is a better predictor of future h-index [295].”
An integrated approach for main path analysis: Development of the Hirsch index as an example (2012, background): “535JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—March 2012 DOI: 10.1002/asi The global main path draws our attention to studies that proposed the variants of the h-index: Jin et al. (2007) and Schreiber (2009b, 2009a).”
An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output that takes into account the effect of multiple coauthorship (2009, background): “[12] Antonakis J., Lalive R. (2008) Quantifying scholarly impact: IQp versus the Hirsch h. Jour. of the Am.”