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

Pantea Kamrani,Wolfgang G Stock,Isabelle Dorsch

doi:10.1007/s11192-021-03968-1

Pantea Kamrani, Wolfgang G Stock + Show 1 more

Open Access

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

Copy DOI

Abstract

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.

Highlights

In 2005, Hirsch introduced his famous h-index
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
We did not find significant differences between the estimations of the importance of the h-index between men and women; there are differences concerning the generations: the older the participants the less important they estimate the importance of the h-index

Summary

Introduction

In 2005, Hirsch introduced his famous h-index. It combines two important measures of scientometrics, namely the publication count of a researcher (as an indicator for his or her research productivity) and the citation count of those publications (as an indicator for his or her research impact). Hirsch (2005, p. 1569) defines, “A scientist has index h if h of his or her Np papers have at least h citations each and the other (Np – h) papers have < h citations each.” If a researcher has written 100 articles, for instance, 20 of these having been cited at least 20 times and the other 80 less than that, the researcher’s h-index will be 20 (Stock and Stock 2013, p. 382). We pursue two goals, namely on the one hand—similar to Buela-Casal and Zych (2012) on the impact factor—the collection of data about researchers’ personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as their discipline, and on the other hand data on the researchers’ concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation. These are our research questions: RQ1: How do researchers estimate the importance of the h-index? In order to answer RQ1, we asked researchers on their personal opinions; to answer RQ2, we performed a test of their knowledge

Methods

Participants

Findings

Discussion