Research Guides: Research Impact Guide: Author Impact

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What is H-Index?

What It Is

A citation-based metric that attempts to measure the influence of an individual researcher (or group of researchers, such as an institution) by considering both productivity (quantity) and impact.
Represents the point at which a scholar has h publications with h citations each. If a scholar has published 10 articles with at least 10 citations each, his h-index is 10.

Advantages

Improvement over total count of publications (which may have no impact) and total count of citations (which may be skewed by one item with significant impact).
May prove particularly informative when used to compare peers in a discipline with a similar number of years in the field.

Disadvantages / Warnings

Should only be compared within a discipline but not between disciplines, since publishing and citing patterns vary among fields.
The length of time in a field impacts h-index, and it thus favors senior researchers and disadvantages early career researchers.

Where to Get It

Freely available from Google Scholar at scholar.google.com for researchers with a Google Scholar Citations page.
Can be obtained from commercial tools such as the Web of Science database (Thomson Reuters), provided by the SHSU library.
Can be calculated with the free Harzing's Publish or Perish program, or the Scholarometer browser extension, both of which use Google Scholar data.
Here is an example of citation counts and an h-index score from a researcher's Google Scholar Citations page:

Google Scholar

Web of Science This link opens in a new window Web of Science provides cover-to-cover indexing in journals from a full range of disciplines, from 1984 to the present. Made up of Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index, each index is a true cited reference index, with citation counts and the ability to trace research forward or backward in time. Links are provided when full-text access is available.

Publish or Perish Program
A. W. Harzing (2007)
Scholarometer

Caveat

There is professional debate over h-index as a metric. Understand its pros and cons before deciding whether and to what extent to use it.

The following article, although targeted at librarians, may provide any researcher with a foundational understanding of this debate.

The h-index Debate: An Introduction for Librarians
By Cameron Barnes. 2017, Journal of Academic Librarianship.

Possible Alternatives to H-index (but with their own weaknesses)

i10-Index
i10-Index = the number of publications with at least 10 citations. Created by and only used by Google Scholar.
G-index
The largest number n of highly cited articles for which the average number of citations is at least n². (In contrast, h-index does not average citation counts and thus ignores very highly cited papers.)
E-Index
Helps assess the ignored excess citations that they may be receiving over and above the h-index. Not for researchers with few publications or citations.