The H Index: James Spills the Tea
James Hodges, MS, a graduate of The University of Northern Colorado’s Research Methods program is a Materials Data Analyst for Research and Development in the area of life cycle materials at Ethicon Endo Surgery Inc. – Johnson & Johnson.
A version of this blog entry was originally published in Lahman, M. (2022). Writing and representing qualitative research. Mentor in Residence Maria Lahman is the author of Writing and Representing Qualitative Research, and the relevant text, Ethics in Social Science Research: Becoming Culturally Responsive. Use the code SAGE30 for a discount when you order the books from SAGE.
What is the H Index?
Though calculated differently, think of the h index as an impact factor but for individual authors. The h index is a single number that measures the influence and impact of an author’s entire body of work (Spicer, 2015). So all of their articles are considered in the creation of the h index (contrasting to JIF, in which recency is a latent contributor since only articles from the past two years are used in the calculation). The h index is the point at which the number of articles an author has published and the number of times each article has been published are the same. So if I have three articles (A, B, and C) and they’ve been cited 4, 9, and 275 times, respectively, then I have an h index of three because I have three articles that have all been cited at least three times.
I’m guessing you can see the issue already with my example, huh? That single number does not tell me the entire story. That single number is so easily influenced that it doesn’t make sense. It’s kind of like the impact factor when I asked, “Are all citations the same?” Did they include citations from all types of your work? Should your contribution to the cited work be considered? What if I boost my citations by allowing myself and frequent coauthors to cite the work we’ve done together previously?
When considering h indices, keep in mind
(a) how long you’ve been in the field,
(b) the normal number of articles your field expects you to publish, and
(c) the stories being told that the single number cannot tell you (quality of your paper, etc.).
(For further information, see André Spicer [2015] and Becker Guides at https://beckerguides.wustl.edu/authors/hindex#_edn1.)