In 2002 the JEFFLINE Forum published a series on Impact Factors and since then several new methods have been devised to help evaluate the importance of a peer-reviewed paper. One of the newest and most interesting rankings is the h-index, named after its inventor Jorge E. Hirsch, a physics Professor at UCSD.
The h-index attempts to answer “how does one quantify the cumulative impact and relevance of an individual's scientific research output?” (1) Hirsch tested his formula with other scholars in various disciplines and they all ended up where they expected. The idea for the new index came to him from publishing papers in journals with low impact factors that garnered citations, which reflected an importance to the field.
How is the h-index calculated?
Using Web of Science, enter the scholar's name in the general search. Reorder the results from most highly cited papers to least cited. The h-index is obtained by moving down the list until the number of the paper, essentially the scholar's h name-exceeds the number of citations from that paper. In short, if the scholar has published 75 papers with at least 75 citations each then the index is 75.
To learn who has the highest recorded h-index, read the article from the Chronicle of Higher Education along with the article introducing the h-index from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The CHE article also mentions other new ranking systems.
1. Hirsch citation: November 15, PNAS 2005 102(46): 16569-16572
Full-text of article available at JEFFLINE
Related Links:
