Four problems of the h-index for assessing the research productivity and impact of individual authors

Henry H. Bi ()
Additional contact information
Henry H. Bi: Willamette University

Scientometrics, 2023, vol. 128, issue 5, No 3, 2677-2691

Abstract: Abstract This paper reveals that when the h-index is used to assess the research productivity and impact of individual authors, four major problems exist because the h-index does not take into account the number of authors in each publication. This paper shows that the fractional h-index (or the individual hi-index in this paper), which distributes each publication’s received citations among its authors, can solve these problems effectively. This paper recommends that websites (such as scholar.google.com and researchgate.net) should add the hi-index for the sake of building a fairer and more ethical research community.

Keywords: Ethics; h-index; Impact; Productivity; Publication; Website (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-022-04323-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:128:y:2023:i:5:d:10.1007_s11192-022-04323-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-022-04323-8

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().