Author-level metrics: h-index and beyond

Abstract

Author-level metrics are usually employed for academic promotion and research funding. The h-index is a way of measuring scientists’ productivity and impact on their field, determined by the number of publications and the number of times those publications have been cited. However, the h-index calculation does not capture the influence of factors such as research topics, article types, highly cited items, self-citations, number and position of authors, and academic career length. Nonetheless, variants of h-index that address some of these limitations correlate widely with their original metric, are not available in bibliographic databases and, overall, add little for measuring research productivity.

Keywords

• Authorship. Hirsch index. Bibliometrics. Internal medicine.