What is an h-index? | How to calculate your h-index
You may wonder what in the world is an h-index. This video will explain what an h-index is, how it is calculated, and how you can get hold of your own h-index. Jorge E. Hirsch formulated the h-index in 2005. You’ll find a link to his very seminal publication below. Initially, the h-index was used as an individual metric, while these days, it is also used to determine the productivity and citation level of impact of a group or journal. The official definition of the h-index described by Hirsch (2005) is “the number of papers with citation number greater or equal to h”. However, you and I both know that this definition on its own does not make much sense, so I explain the definition in the video by way of two examples.
Although the h-index is a better metric than the total number of papers, there are challenges when using the h index to measure impact. It is suitable for comparing scholars working in the same field, but not for comparing those in different fields. This is because the h-index is influenced by the average number of references in a paper in the specific field, the average number of papers produced by each scientist in the field, and the size of the field in terms of the number of scholars/scientists. Also, if an author has a low number of publications but each of them is cited widely, the h-index won’t reflect the impact of that authors work correctly.
The good news is that Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus calculates your h-index on your behalf. Your h-index will differ from platform to platform, seeing that these platforms include different publications and their citations into their databases. Tell me, by leaving a comment in the comment box below this video, do you know of any other platforms which calculate an h-index? And which other citation metrics are you familiar with? Let us know so we can all learn from each other!
Hirsch 2005 seminal paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4152261?...
Google Scholar h-index: https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/sc...
Scopus h-index: https://blog.scopus.com/topics/h-index
Web of Science h-index: • Video
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