H-index
author-level metric that to measure the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a person
The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The h-index correlates with success indicators such as winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index has more recently been applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal as well as a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country.
The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UC San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.
Hirsch intended the h-index to address the main disadvantages of other bibliometric indicators. The total-number-of-papers metric does not account for the quality of scientific publications. The total number of citations metric, on the other hand, can be heavily affected by participation in a single publication of major influence (for instance, methodological papers proposing successful new techniques, methods or approximations, which can generate a large number of citations).
The index works best when comparing scholars working in the same field, since citation conventions differ widely among different fields.
The h-index is intended to measure simultaneously the quality and quantity of scientific output.
The public source identifies “H-index” as author-level metric that to measure the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a person. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around H-index, author-level and metric.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q310663. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “H-index” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.