A Critique of Hirsch’s Citation Index: A Combinatorial Fermi Problem
Alexander Yong · Notices of the American Mathematical Society · 2014
Hi05] proposed the h-index to measure the quality of a researcher's output.This metric is the largest integer n such that the person has n papers with at least n citations each, and all other papers have weakly less than n citations.Although the original focus of Hirsch's index was on physicists, the h-index is now widely popular.For example, Google Scholar and the Web of Science highlight the h-index, among other metrics such as total citation count, in their profile summaries.An enticing point made by Hirsch is that the h-index is an easy and useful supplement to a citation count (N citations ), since the latter metric may be skewed by a small number of highly cited papers or textbooks.In his words: "I argue that two individuals with similar h's are comparable in terms of their overall scientific impact, even if their total number of papers or their total number of citations is very different.Conversely, comparing two individuals (of the same scientific age) with a similar number of total papers or of total citation count and very different h values, the one with the higher h is likely to be the more accomplished scientist."It seems to us that users might tend to eyeball differences of h's and citation counts among individuals during their assessments.Instead, one