Abstract
Recent editorials and debates in the literature have highlighted the h-index measurement scale for researchers and how it can be used as a measure of their contributions to the medical and scientific community [1–5]. Indeed, in many University Institutions, the h-index (or h-factor) is being employed for assessment of regrading applications and for individual academics impact. So like it or not, it is here to stay and play. Whilst the debate will continue, it is definite that there are factors which can weight the h-index value to either advantage or disadvantage the researcher. Baldock [6] quite elegantly pointed out how subtle ways of citing papers can occur to benefit one’s h-index. This is inevitable. However, one area where substantial improvements could be made to the h-index may lie in the area of enhancing the h-index score by weighting first author papers or a hfa-index. This may not be practical if a large proportion of journals used alphabetical listings for authors. However this practice is not common and a well established researcher would normally publish in multiple journals reducing this overall effect. Upon investigation, according to the ISI Journal Citation Reports 2009, of the top 20 journals ranked in the subsection of ‘‘Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Medical Imaging’’, no journals used alphabetical name order convention. The h-index [7, 8] of course is a measure of impact and quality of a medical or scientific researcher and is easy to calculate as the number of papers, h, that have each attracted h citations or more—the author’s other papers (Np-h) will have \h citations each. One major factor which this value does not examine is the contribution to each paper by the individual author within the paper. This would be difficult to calculate, even if there was a percentage contribution per author given in the paper details as it would have to be extracted for each paper and values weighted accordingly. As the % contribution to the work is not acknowledged by the h-index is would be easier to achieve a higher h-index value by working with a large group of scholars as compared to a small group. For example take a group of six researchers working together with an average output of two papers per year each. This group could then produce 12 papers per year. Whilst a small M. J. Butson P. K. N. Yu Department of Physics and Materials Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong
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