A Corrected H-Index for Academic Leadership Determination: A Bibliographic Research

Abstract

Background: Academic medical leadership is closely related to scientific research productivity and publication. A researcher’s h-index is based on his/her most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other’s publications. It is generally determined by knowing the number of articles written by the author indexed in citation databases. An H-index will be 10 if 10 articles have received at least 10 citations. Ignoring the order and authorship role of an individual researcher may lead to rather a misleading H-index that is totally not relevant to academic leadership determination. The publishing of research conducted by a large collaborative research group made many collaborators with minor role in research creation, development and leadership obtain a high misleading H-index and is not correlated with their academic and research prowess. The use of methods that increase the reliability of the H-index has been increasingly recommended. The aim of this paper is to describe the determination of a more accurate, non-misleading H-index that is more relevant to academic leadership determination. Materials and Methods: An author was found to have an extremely misleading H-index of 28 at Google Scholar citation that is not relevant to academic leadership deterioration. The papers’ citations in his profile were assessed and a corrected rational non-misleading H-index was determined. Results: The author name was not among the first five authors for the first 20 papers listed by Google Scholar Citation, and in most of these papers, his name was not present among the first ten authors. The author name appears among the first three authors in 9 papers (Number 27, 28,29, 36, 41, 43, 45, 47, 50) as listed by Google Scholar Citation. These papers has 34, 30, 21, 10, 5, 5,4,4,3 citations respectively. The author real H-index is 5; because he has at least 5 papers having five citations (Number 27, 28, 29, 36, 41, 43). Conclusion: The corrected H-index should be calculated while considering the papers really authored by an individual author who should be among the first three authors. Many authors who join a large collaborative research group will generally have a minor contribution to research development and publication, but they may achieve a rather misleading high H-index. It is recommended that Google Scholar Citation adopt the corrected H-index to guarantee the reliability and usefulness of the H-index.