{"id":328,"date":"2020-05-04T07:56:02","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T07:56:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/?p=328"},"modified":"2020-05-04T07:56:02","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T07:56:02","slug":"does-the-h-index-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/2020\/05\/04\/does-the-h-index-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Does the H-Index matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently two articles on the H-Index caught my attention. The one, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.natureindex.com\/news-blog\/whats-wrong-with-the-h-index-according-to-its-inventor\">What is wrong with the H-Index?<\/a> is about how Jorge Hirsch, the creator of the H-Index, criticized the current use of it. And the other was a <a href=\"https:\/\/libraryconnect.elsevier.com\/articles\/raising-visibility-your-institution-and-researchers\">case study<\/a> on how the University of Groningen handles research impact services. They moved away from\u00a0 using the journal impact factor (IF) and the H-index, and started to use article-level metrics such as field-weighted citation impact (FWCI).<\/p>\n<p><strong>What is the H-Index?<\/strong>\u00a0 It is a metric that takes into account both the number of papers a researcher has published and how many citations they receive. It has become a popular tool for <strong>assessing job candidates and grant applicants<\/strong>. The formula on how it is calculated: \u00a0the number of publications for which an author has been cited by other authors at least that same number of times.<\/p>\n<p>According to the above article <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/ftp\/arxiv\/papers\/2001\/2001.09496.pdf\">Jorge Hirsch wrote<\/a> in January 2020 in the <em>Physics and Society<\/em> newsletter that the H-Index can &#8220;fail spectacularly and have severe unintended negative consequences&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Hirsch asked hiring committees and funding agencies to not only rely on the H-Index, but also to consider other aspects of a candidate\u2019s career, such as discipline, and how many collaborators a researcher works with.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cOne has to look at the nature of the work,\u201d &#8230; \u201cIf you make decisions just based on someone\u2019s H-index, you can end up hiring the wrong person or denying a grant to someone who is much more likely to do something important. It has to be used carefully.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/files\/2020\/05\/H-Index.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-thumbnail wp-image-329\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/files\/2020\/05\/H-Index-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/files\/2020\/05\/H-Index-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/files\/2020\/05\/H-Index.jpg 580w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently two articles on the H-Index caught my attention. The one, What is wrong with the H-Index? is about how Jorge Hirsch, the creator of the H-Index, criticized the current use of it. And the other was a case study on how the University of Groningen handles research impact services. They moved away from\u00a0 using [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9tu3H-5i","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":330,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions\/330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sun.ac.za\/libraryresearchnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}