Étiquette : h-index

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Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

Authors : Pantea Kamrani, Isabelle Dorsch, Wolfgang G. Stock

The h-index is a widely used scientometric indicator on the researcher level working with a simple combination of publication and citation counts. In this article, we pursue two goals, namely the collection of empirical data about researchers’ personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as for their academic disciplines, and on the researchers’ concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation.

We worked with an online survey (including a knowledge test on the calculation of the h-index), which was finished by 1081 German university professors. We distinguished between the results for all participants, and, additionally, the results by gender, generation, and field of knowledge.

We found a clear binary division between the academic knowledge fields: For the sciences and medicine the h-index is important for the researchers themselves and for their disciplines, while for the humanities and social sciences, economics, and law the h-index is considerably less important.

Two fifths of the professors do not know details on the h-index or wrongly deem to know what the h-index is and failed our test. The researchers’ knowledge on the h-index is much smaller in the academic branches of the humanities and the social sciences.

As the h-index is important for many researchers and as not all researchers are very knowledgeable about this author-specific indicator, it seems to be necessary to make researchers more aware of scholarly metrics literacy.

URL : Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03968-1

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Researchers’ attitudes towards the h-index on Twitter 2007–2020: criticism and acceptance

Authors : Mike Thelwall, Kayvan Kousha

The h-index is an indicator of the scientific impact of an academic publishing career. Its hybrid publishing/citation nature and inherent bias against younger researchers, women, people in low resourced countries, and those not prioritizing publishing arguably give it little value for most formal and informal research evaluations.

Nevertheless, it is well-known by academics, used in some promotion decisions, and is prominent in bibliometric databases, such as Google Scholar. In the context of this apparent conflict, it is important to understand researchers’ attitudes towards the h-index.

This article used public tweets in English to analyse how scholars discuss the h-index in public: is it mentioned, are tweets about it positive or negative, and has interest decreased since its shortcomings were exposed?

The January 2021 Twitter Academic Research initiative was harnessed to download all English tweets mentioning the h-index from the 2006 start of Twitter until the end of 2020. The results showed a constantly increasing number of tweets.

Whilst the most popular tweets unapologetically used the h-index as an indicator of research performance, 28.5% of tweets were critical of its simplistic nature and others joked about it (8%). The results suggest that interest in the h-index is still increasing online despite scientists willing to evaluate the h-index in public tending to be critical.

Nevertheless, in limited situations it may be effective at succinctly conveying the message that a researcher has had a successful publishing career.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03961-8

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On the “persistency” of scientific publications: introducing an h-index for journals

Author : Roberto Piazza

What do we really mean by a “good” scientific journal? Do we care more about the short-time impact of our papers, or about the chance that they will still bhe read and cited on the long run?

Here I show that, by regarding a journal as a “virtual scientist” that can be attributed a time-dependent Hirsch h-index, we can introduce a parameter that, arguably, better captures the “persistency” of a scientific publication. Curiously, however, this parameter seems to depend above all on the “thickness” of a journal.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.09390

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Web Services for Bibliometrics

Institutional repositories have spread in universities where they provide services for recording, distributing, and preserving the institution’s intellectual output. When the Lausanne “academic server”, named SERVAL, was launched at the end of 2008, the Faculty of Biology and Medicine addressed from the outset the issue of quality of metadata. Accuracy is fundamental since research funds are allocated on the basis of the statistics and indicators provided by the repository. The Head of faculty also charged the medical library to explore different ways to measure and assess the research output. The first step for the Lausanne university medical library was to implement the PubMed and the Web of Science web services to easily extract clean bibliographic information from the databases directly into the repository.

Now the medical library is testing other web services (from CrossRef, Web of Science, etc.) to generate quantitative data on research impact mainly. The approach is essentially based on citation linking. Although the utility of citation and bibliometric evaluation is still debated, the most prevalent output measures used for research evaluation are still those based on citation analysis. Even when a new scientific evaluation indicator is proposed, such as h-index, we can always see its link with citation. Additionally, the results of a new indicator are often compared with citation analysis. The presentation will review the web services which might be used in institutional repositories to collect and aggregate citation information for the researchers’ publications.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00540289/fr/

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Measuring the visibility of the University’s scientific production using GoogleScholar, “Publish or Perish” software and Scientometrics

Open access to scientific information through institutional digital repositories presents today’s world information environment and the transformations imposed by information society.

The first Romanian institutional repository was implemented at Transilvania University of Brasov. As part of the undertaken research, the visibility and the impact of the university’s scientific production was measured using the scientific methods of scientometry, as a fundamental instrument for determining the international value of an university as well as for the statistical evaluation of scientific research results.

The results showed that an open access institutional repository would significantly add to the visibility of the university’s scientific production.In this article we define the scientific production and productivity and present the main indicators for the measurement of the scientific activity.

The impact of the research is analyzed and measured through scientometric indicators. The analysis of the citations represents a scientometric indicator for the evaluation of the scientific researches.

Through the number of citations we can analyse the quality of the scientific information. Google Scholar was used as a scientometric database which can be consulted free of charge on the Internet and which indexes academic papers from institutional repositories, identifying also the referenced citations.

The free “Publish or Perish” software can be used as an analysis instrument for the impact of the research, by analysing the citations through the h-index.

We present the methodology and the results of an exploratory study made at the Transilvania University of Brasov regarding the h-index of the academic staff. H-index was calculated by using “Publish or Perish” software, comparing the number of ISI indexed published articles and the number of citations from “ISI Web of Science”.

Using “Publish or Perish”, we calculated h-index, g-index, hc-index and HI norm. We analyzed the research performances achieved by Brasov academic community in 2008, as realised in their annual evaluation -number of papers, books, research contracts, etc- by comparing the four indexes of those 60 professors with the best results.

We will present correlation indicators and the importance of open access for increasing the impact of scientific research by using institutional repositories.

URL : https://www.ifla.org/past-wlic/2010/155-repanovici-en.pdf