 The h-index: A case of the tail wagging the dog?Quentin L. Burrell Journal of Informetrics, 2013, vol. 7, issue 4, 774-783 Abstract: From the way that it was initially defined (Hirsch, 2005), the h-index naturally encourages focus on the most highly cited publications of an author and this in turn has led to (predominantly) a rank-based approach to its investigation. However, Hirsch (2005) and Burrell (2007a) both adopted a frequency-based approach leading to general conjectures regarding the relationship between the h-index and the author's publication and citation rates as well as his/her career length. Here we apply the distributional results of Burrell (2007a, 2013b) to three published data sets to show that a good estimate of the h-index can often be obtained knowing only the number of publications and the number of citations. (Exceptions can occur when an author has one or more “outliers” in the upper tail of the citation distribution.) In other words, maybe the main body of the distribution determines the h-index, not the wild wagging of the tail. Furthermore, the simple geometric distribution turns out to be the key. Keywords: Citation distribution; Publication-citation process; Geometric distribution; Non-linear equations; Quasi h-index; h-Index profile (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:7:y:2013:i:4:p:774-783 DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2013.06.004 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier |
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