Posts Tagged ‘h-index’


July 31, 2019

There are a lot of things difficult about being a professor at a research-oriented university. But one benefit that this profession enjoys is clarity. How well or how poorly you’re doing as an academic researcher can be boiled down to a simple question: Are you publishing important papers? The answer to this question can even be quantified as a single number, such as the h-index: a formula, named for its inventor, Jorge Hirsch, that processes your publication and citation counts into a single value that approximates your impact on your field. In computer science, for example, an h-index score above 40 is difficult to achieve and once reached is considered the mark of a strong long-term career. On the other hand, if your h-index is in the single digits when your case goes up for tenure review, you’re probably in trouble. Google Scholar, a tool popular among academics for finding research papers, even calculates your h-index automatically so you can be reminded, multiple times per week, precisely where you stand.
