The h Index – Help or Hype?

Three years ago a bibliometric index for the qualification of a person's scientific output was proposed by Hirsch, the so-called h index. This is an integer number which combines the number of papers of an author and the number of citations they gathered. Thus the h index is an indicator for both the productivity and the impact of a scientist. This paper presents the properties of the h index and the great attention it attracted within a short time. Numerous other indices, claimed to be better than the original, were proposed in the meantime. These developments are discussed critically.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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