h-index

For similar reasons outlined by Zhigang’s post node/2345 I
have found it necessary to find comparisons in publication citation
metrics/indices whilst in Academic employment. Much has been discussed about
the appropriate use of these metrics and the arguments on the benefits and
drawbacks are both compelling. Whatever your opinion, it seems that for the
foreseeable future these publication citation metrics are here to stay.

This is an interesting article: Fraud, the h-index and Pasternak. How do we evaluate ourselves and others, especially those not in our own fields? We may not have to find an answer as an individual researcher, but the univeristy adminstrators have to.

After some conversation with Roozbeh which are "irritatingly useful" :) I found that this site has done already all the calculations we need http://www.scimagojr.com/  except the list of highlycited papers which remains for me the most interesting aspect and which we seem to need to do manually as we did yesterday with IJSS and JMPS at Most cited papers and H-factor of some mechanics journals -- IJSS

Some results are attached as a big PDF file.

On the Web of Science my name appears sometimes as Suo Z and sometimes as Suo ZG.  If I search for Suo Z*, papers by a biologist named Suo ZM mix in.  Now Suo is a very rare name.  I cannot imagine how Wang JS searches for his papers.  Last year Michelle Oyen and I talked about assigning a unique identifier to each researcher, much like assigning an ISBN to each edition of a book, or assigning a DOI to each paper.

In preparing cases for faculty appointments, my colleagues in other fields often ask about citations of each candidate and his or her comparees.  Despite obvious resistance, my colleagues give following reasons:

We extend the pioneering work of J.E. Hirsch, the inventor of the h-index, by proposing a simple and seemingly robust approach for comparing the scientific productivity and visibility of institutions. Our main findings are that i) while the h-index is a sensible criterion for comparing scientists within a given field, it does not directly extend to rank institutions of disparate sizes and journals, ii) however, the h-index, which always increases with paper population, has an universal growth rate for large numbers of papers; iii) thus the h-index of a large population of papers can be decomposed into the product of an impact index and a factor depending on the population size, iv) as a complement to the h-index, this new impact index provides an interesting way to compare the scientific production of institutions (universities, laboratories or journals).