2010/02/04 by S. Redner, S Redner · 1 voice
Chemistry · Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #History and advancements in chemistry #Science and Science Education #cs.DL #physics.data-an #physics.soc-ph #scientometrics and bibliometrics research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2010/03/l03005
published as J. Stat. Mech. L03005 (2010) · 3 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, revtex4 format
arxiv created 2010/02/04 · openalex publication_date 2010/03/16 · arxiv updated 2010/03/18 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The h-index -- the value for which an individual has published at least h papers with at least h citations -- has become a popular metric to assess the citation impact of scientists. As already noted in the original work of Hirsch and as evidenced from data of a representative sample of physicists, sqrtc scales as h, where c is the total number citations to an individual. Thus sqrtc appears to be equivalent to the h index. As a further check of this equivalence, the distribution of the ratio s=sqrtc/2h for this sample is sharply peaked about 1. The outliers in this distribution reveal fundamentally different types of individual publication records.