The state of h index research

Abstract

How does one measure the quality of science? The question is not rhetorical; it is extremely relevant to promotion committees, funding agencies, national academies and politicians, all of whom need a means by which to recognize and reward good research and good researchers. Identifying high-quality science is necessary for science to progress, but measuring quality becomes even more important in a time when individual scientists and entire research fields increasingly compete for limited amounts of money. The most obvious measure available is the bibliographic record of a scientist or research institute-that is, the number and impact of their publications.Currently, the tool most widely used to determine the quality of scientific publications is the journal impact factor (IF), which is calculated by the scientific division of Thomson Reuters (New York, NY, USA) and is published annually in the Journal Citation Reports ( JCR). The IF itself was developed in the 1960s by Eugene Garfield and Irving H. Sher, who were concerned that simply counting the number of articles a journal published in any given year would miss out small but influential journals in their Science Citation Index (Garfield, 2006). The IF is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year and is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year-for example, 2007-by the total number of articles published in the two previous years-2005 and 2006. Lutz Bornmann (left) and Hans-Dieter Daniel are at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Determining scientific impact using a collaboration index

“…We anticipate that the axiomatic approach of credit assignment will become a main tool in development of academic assessment or peer review systems (15). Its most appealing feature is the rigorous foundation including the distribution assumption (Axiom 3) for the credit vector, which gives a fair and balanced estimate for the true collaboration credit.…”

“…Unfortunately, both researchers receive an H-index of 2. This example points out that the H-index performs poorly for young academics with few publications, which has been well documented (15).…”

“…For each department we sampled 50% of their assistant, associate, and full professors as designated on the department's webpage of core faculty. For each faculty member in the (15). To calculate the A-index we collected detailed paper information only for papers in 2010.…”

H-indeks - et godt mål på forskningsaktivitet?

“…Diskusjonen har selvsagt gått varmt i publiseringsverdenen, hvilket gjenspeiler seg i at antall siteringer av Hirsch's originale artikkel økte fra 50 i 2007 til over 650 i 2010 (4,5).…”

Estudio cienciométrico de la actividad científica de Cuba en las Ciencias Naturales e Ingeniería y Matemática-Ciencias de la Computación

“…Al respecto, los estudios cienciométricos que permitan de manera integrada reflejar el estado de la producción del conocimiento científico de un país, su visibilidad e impacto, así como identificar las relaciones económicas que apoyen los procesos de investigación e innovación son de vital de importancia para lograr un mejor aprovechamiento del potencial científico y la distribución de los recursos financieros (Bornmann y Hans-Dieter, 2009;Ball, 2007).…”