H-index and How Influential a Researcher is
When citing research papers, an important factor to note is how influential the paper that you are citing is. How do we measure how influential a research is? This blog, “Explainer: what is an H-index and how is it calculated?” explains that the h-index is used as a metric for indicating how productive and influential a researcher is. The h-index was invented by Jorge Hirsch in 2005 (hence the “h”). If a researcher has an h-index of h, it means that the researcher has h papers that have at least h citations each, and the other papers have no more than h citations each. This is better than the traditional measure of calculating the number of papers that has cited this research. This is because you could get a large score by writing one paper that gets cited by a lot of people. This h-index requires that you not only have depth – many people that cited a paper of yours, but also breadth – having many papers that is being cited by a significant number of people.
This relates to what we have learned in class about web link analysis. Counting citations is very similar to how we counted in-links in web structures. A web page that is pointed to by a lot of other pages is generally better than a web page that is not. Similarly, if a lot of other papers cited this paper, then this paper is considered to be an influential one. However, similarly to the web case, this h-index also faces the problem that calculating web in-links face. A person can increase the h-index by self-citation and having a group of people who often cite each other’s work. Therefore, rating how influential a researcher is based on h-index should be used as one measure but not the only factor.
Link: http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-an-h-index-and-how-is-it-calculated-41162