WoW! Wouter over het Web

Yesterday I had the honour to be present with a presentation by Dr. Hirsch on the h-index. He started his presentation with expressing his dislike on Impact Factors for the evaluation of research performance. This was partly caused by the fact that some of his somewhat controversial articles were not accepted by the big, high impact journals, but only by the second tier of journals (still some quite important titles though). These articles garnered quite a lot of citations though.
What Hirsch shared with us, was that he had developed his h-index in 2003 already. Hi s prinicple interest for the h-index was the purpose of evaluating researchers, whether it was for grants, promotions or tenure. He found it quite a useful measure. Even some of his colleagues at UCSD started using it.
So over spring 2005 he wrote down his method in a potential article, which he send to some of his colleagues. Unfortunately nobody responded. However somewhat later he received inquiries about his ‘h-index’. As a physicist he then took the decision to post the article as a preprint on ArXiv in August 2005. It immediately got attention in news items publisehd by Nature and Science, and soon after that it was published in PNAS.
Quite amazing the article gained already 18 citations, of which most articles stemmed from the field of LIS. Scientometrics virtually spend nearly a complete issue on this subject.
There have been some proposals for improvements on the h-index already, but most of these did not gain Hirsch’s approval since they did not really improve the h-index, or reduced the simplicity of the h-index.
In his presentation he dealt with some more caveats of the h-index and some of the possible improvements. He was pondering on measures of the slope of his figure 1. He was thinking about the second order derivative somewhere around h. The pitfall is the discrete behaviour of his graph 1.
The other point he raised was the improvement on corrections for number of co-authors. That he found more important than the correction for self citations. The h-index is likely to be less sensitive for self citations. Unless one deals with a very prolific author who manages to cite his papers just below his or hers h-index. The latter is quite unlikely though.
We also discussed the state of LIS briefly as well, where paper of a single author could attract in such a brief period so many citations. When I sketched the perspective of the fact that Eugene Garfield was a chemist by training, or van Raan was a physicist as well, it did not really appeal to him to change his research topics. He will continue to pursue his super conductivity research.
So where did the expression Hirsch index come from? Hirsch didn’t know. He dubbed it h-index thinking on high impact, certainly not his own name.

Technorati tags: Hirsch; h-index

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