Читать книгу A Guide to the Scientific Career - Группа авторов - Страница 89

The h‐index (a.k.a., the Hirsch index or the Hirsch number) was originally proposed by Hirsch as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative academic productivity. Since its inception, this index has attracted the attention of the scientific community for assessing the scientific performance of a researcher based on bibliometric data. Prior to widespread use of the h‐index, the individual scientific performance was assessed using unidimensional metrics, such as the number of articles published, the number of citations received by the published articles, or the average number of citations per article. The h‐index has a bidimensional nature, simultaneously taking into account both the quality and quantity of scientific output, because it is based on an aggregate set of the researcher's most cited papers along with the associated citations received by those publications. The h‐index can also be applied to quantify the productivity and impact of a group of researchers belonging to a department, university, or country.

Among the advantages of the h‐index is its simplicity and ease of calculation. It aims at reflecting high‐quality works, as it combines both citation impact (citations received by the papers) with publication activity (number of papers published). The h‐index is not influenced by a single, successful paper that has received many citations. Nor is the h‐index sensitive to less frequently cited publications. Furthermore, increasing the number of publications will not necessarily affect the h‐index. By definition of Hirsch (2005), “A scientist has index h if h of his N papers have at least h citations each, and the other (N − h) papers have at most h citations each.”