'h' Index And Its Applicability

Jorge E.Hirsch(2005),a physicist at UCSD,proposed a new indicator for assessment of the research performance of individual scientists.This measure -called h-index-is designed for application at the micro level,and measures both publication activity and citation impact.Hirsch defined the h-index as follows:A scientist has index h ifh of his/her papers have at least h citations,and the other papers have fewer than h citations each.The idea was effectively publicized by Ball's news items in Nature,and it has already got positive reception in the physics community and also in the scientometrics.However,current studies on h index and its applicability were all based on foreign databases to evaluate foreign scientists and journals,implied that we should introduce the indicator to China and focus on its applicability first.With investigation and analysis of literature from home and abroad,the dissertation uses the bibliometric and comparison as the main methods to analyze and study the h index and its applicability.The first part of the dissertation focuses on the retrieval tools comparison. Results show that domestic Chinese citation database,foreign SCI database,SCOPUS database,QuadSearch Scholar,Google Scholar are available for calculating h index. The second part focuses on the applicability of h index to evaluate domestic scientists. Results show that application in domestic scientists are hindered by many factors, such as authors with the same name,discipline differences,multiple authors of an academic paper,author self-citation and so on.Accordingly,we propose some methods and skills of amendment.The third part focuses on the applicability of h index to Chinese mainland SCI journals,universities and research institutions, disciplines,nations or regions,presses.Results show:â‘ the relationship between IF and h index is that of mutual compensation,IF reflecting its short-term academic impact with high sensitivity and h index for its long-term academic impact with high stability.Thus the combined use of the two indices can give a full picture of the journal.â‘¡Comparing with applicability of h index used for scientist evaluation,its use for evaluating academic output and academic influence of universities or research institutions for a few years,to some extent,is more accurate mainly because of its wide range of disciplinary coverage.Calculating the discipline' h index on the basis of the institution's can reflects not only the discipline characteristics of the institution, but also the relative academic impact of a discipline among different institutions, namely discipline's h index/institution's h index.â‘¢h index can both reflect academic output quality of small countries and academic output quantity of big countries,make up for the deficiency of total number of papers,total number of citations,average number of citations per paper,and tell the state's overall scientific and technological innovation.â‘£Results of evaluation for presses show that academic impact of national-level press is better than that of provincial-level press,science and technology than that of social science,which fits the principle of the truth and public expectations.In addition,evaluation results of Press h index and LM competitiveness index are of great relevance in this study.The fourth part focuses on comparing h index with the traditional academic evaluation indices,with a view to further reveal the nature of h index,h index reflects the concentrated essence,with 20 percent best elements of Pareto distribution representing overall and nature of things.Deficiencies of h index can be overcome through integrating h index with the traditional scientific measurements;with total number of papers for the deficiency of h index not to increase with the increasing number of papers cited less than h times,with total number of citations for that of h index not to distinguish the scientists with same h index but different academic impact, with average number of citations per paper for that of h index not to evaluate the scientists with low-yield but high-impact fairly and accurately,and with the immediacy index for that of h index not to stop increasing while no new papers are published.As to the shortcomings of h index caused by the citations analysis itself, the second part of the dissertation has given a detailed analysis.Conclusions:â‘ h index is more suitable for evaluation of scientific and technical journals,conferences,and presses.The reason is that boundaries of the evaluation obejects are relatively clear.Periodicals' h index and its derivatives combined with other traditional indicators can give the spectrum of the journal's academic impacts. Although there may exist noise interference during journals' h index evaluation,such as authors' and periodicals' self-citation,discipline differences,but as a whole,it can make it.Preliminary results show that the presses' evaluation is also in its list.â‘¡h index is basically suitable for evaluation of scientists,disciplines,institutes,and countries.Scientific paper,as the main form of research output,is frequently used for evaluation of scientific performance,upon which h index balancing quantity and quality of the papers naturally is in accordance with the new academic-oriented demand.However,there are many other issues during the evaluation process for the mentioned objects.Problems involving discipline evaluation are mainly caused by emerging cross-discipline and interdisciplinary blurring boundaries between disciplines.â‘¢h index is less suitable for evaluation of Great Master of Science and young scientists mainly because of the time limitation of literature resources collected in the database,number of papers published,citation habits to the master's literatures and so on,and not suitable for evaluation of secret research labs and its staff, periodicals.The inspiration:before putting a new evaluation indicator into practice,a great amount of works need to be done,to study and master its true meaning,to screen its measurement tools,to analyze its possible impact factors,to explore appropriate corrections,to apply it to the appropriate objects,with the final purpose to gain true, reliable,credible,and available evaluation results.