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Carnegie Mellon University Africa: Libraries Resources for Faculty and Staff

h-index

The “h-index” was introduced in 2005 by the American physicist, Professor Jorge Hirsch in his article “An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output as a mean to measure both the scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist.

The H-index is relatively effective in comparing researchers working in the same scientific field, and not comparable across disciplines due to different publishing and citation patterns.

How to calculate h-index?

The h-index is based on a list of publications ranked in descending order by the Times Cited. The value of h is equal to the number of papers (N) in the list that have N or more citations.

Ex. An h-index of 10 means that there are ten papers that have ten or more citations.