The Hirsch index - a play on numbers or a true appraisal of academic output?

Saleem, Taimur

doi:10.1186/1755-7682-4-25

Cited by 31 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…5,25,43,52 For example, the h-index favors senior researchers since h-index numbers can never decrease; the index also relies on time for researchers to generate a sufficient number of papers and then more time for those papers to be cited. As a result, other metrics have been proposed to counteract the shortcomings of the h-index.…”

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confidence: 99%

An analysis of publication productivity for 1225 academic neurosurgeons and 99 departments in the United States

Khan¹,

Thompson

Taylor

et al. 2014

JNS

102

116

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Object Bibliometrics is defined as the study of statistical and mathematical methods used to quantitatively analyze scientific literature. The application of bibliometrics in neurosurgery is in its infancy. The authors calculate a number of publication productivity measures for almost all academic neurosurgeons and departments within the US. Methods The h-index, g-index, m-quotient, and contemporary h-index (hc-index) were calculated for 1225 academic neurosurgeons in 99 (of 101) programs listed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education in January 2013. Three currently available citation databases were used: Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. Bibliometric profiles were created for each surgeon. Comparisons based on academic rank (that is, chairperson, professor, associate, assistant, and instructor), sex, and subspecialties were performed. Departments were ranked based on the summation of individual faculty h-indices. Calculations were carried out from January to February 2013. Results The median h-index, g-index, hc-index, and m-quotient were 11, 20, 8, and 0.62, respectively. All indices demonstrated a positive relationship with increasing academic rank (p < 0.001). The median h-index was 11 for males (n = 1144) and 8 for females (n = 81). The h-index, g-index and hc-index significantly varied by sex (p < 0.001). However, when corrected for academic rank, this difference was no longer significant. There was no difference in the m-quotient by sex. Neurosurgeons with subspecialties in functional/epilepsy, peripheral nerve, radiosurgery, neuro-oncology/skull base, and vascular have the highest median h-indices; general, pediatric, and spine neurosurgeons have the lowest median h-indices. By summing the manually calculated Scopus h-indices of all individuals within a department, the top 5 programs for publication productivity are University of California, San Francisco; Barrow Neurological Institute; Johns Hopkins University; University of Pittsburgh; and University of California, Los Angeles. Conclusions This study represents the most detailed publication analysis of academic neurosurgeons and their programs to date. The results for the metrics presented should be viewed as benchmarks for comparison purposes. It is our hope that organized neurosurgery will adopt and continue to refine bibliometric profiling of individuals and departments.

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confidence: 99%

An analysis of publication productivity for 1225 academic neurosurgeons and 99 departments in the United States

Khan¹,

Thompson

Taylor

et al. 2014

JNS

102

116

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Despite its flaws, the currently used h-index is a useful way of measuring a researcher’s total publication output, whereas the primary output as first, shared first, last and shared last author is not measured 2,3,5,6 . Since the employed algorithm used for the h-index calculation is already recognized as useful by the scientific community and is widely used, we believe that addition of the primary research output information to this would be also useful.…”

Section: How Will This Updated H-index Help the Research Community Anmentioning

confidence: 99%

An updated h-index measures both the primary and total scientific output of a researcher

et al. 2015

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The growing interest in scientometry stems from ethical concerns related to the proper evaluation of scientific contributions of an author working in a hard science. In the absence of a consensus, institutions may use arbitrary methods for evaluating scientists for employment and promotion. There are several indices in use that attempt to establish the most appropriate and suggestive position of any scientist in the field he/she works in. A scientist’s Hirsch-index (h-index) quantifies their total effective published output, but h-index summarizes the total value of their published work without regard to their contribution to each publication. Consequently, articles where the author was a primary contributor carry the same weight as articles where the author played a minor role. Thus, we propose an updated h-index named Hirsch(p,t)-index that informs about both total scientific output and output where the author played a primary role. Our measure, h(p,t) = h(p),h(t), is composed of the h-index h(t) and the h-index calculated for articles where the author was a key contributor; i.e. first/shared first or senior or corresponding author. Thus, a h(p,t) = 5,10 would mean that the author has 5 articles as first, shared first, senior or corresponding author with at least 5 citations each, and 10 total articles with at least 10 citations each. This index can be applied in biomedical disciplines and in all areas where the first and last position on an article are the most important. Although other indexes, such as r- and w-indexes, were proposed for measuring the authors output based on the position of researchers within the published articles, our simpler strategy uses the already established algorithms for h-index calculation and may be more practical to implement.

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“…Using a bibliometric measure to evaluate the performance of scientists, for example, is common practice (Nature 2017). One of the most frequently used of such metrics is the h-index (Ball 2007;Saleem 2011). It computes a value depending on the number of papers published by a scientist and their respective impact on other researches such that:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative analysis of automatic performance evaluation systems based on the h-index

et al. 2020

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Since the h-index has been invented, it is the most frequently discussed bibliometric value and one of the most commonly used metrics to quantify a researcher's scientific output. The more it is increasingly gaining popularity to use the metric as an indication of the quality of a job applicant or an employee the more important it is to assure its correctitude. Many platforms offer the h-index of a scientist as a service, sometimes without the explicit knowledge of the respective person. In this article we show that looking up the h-index for a researcher on the five most commonly used platforms, namely AMiner, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Scopus and Web of Science, results in a variance that is in many cases as large as the average value. This is due to the varying definitions of what a scientific article is, the underlying data basis, and different qualities of the entity recognition problem. To perform our study, we crawled the h-index of the worlds top researchers according to two different rankings, all the Nobel Prize laureates except Literature and Peace, and the teaching staff of the computer science department of the TU Kaiserslautern Germany with whom we additionally computed their h-index manually. Thus we showed that the individual h-indices differ to an alarming extent between the platforms. We observed that researchers with an extraordinary high h-index and researchers with an index appropriate to the scientific career path and the respective scientific field are affected alike by these problems.

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The Hirsch index - a play on numbers or a true appraisal of academic output?

Cited by 31 publications

References 33 publications

An analysis of publication productivity for 1225 academic neurosurgeons and 99 departments in the United States

An analysis of publication productivity for 1225 academic neurosurgeons and 99 departments in the United States

An updated h-index measures both the primary and total scientific output of a researcher

Quantitative analysis of automatic performance evaluation systems based on the h-index

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