{"id":1371,"date":"2010-07-30T17:45:35","date_gmt":"2010-07-31T00:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=1371"},"modified":"2023-08-03T13:52:05","modified_gmt":"2023-08-03T20:52:05","slug":"scientific-impact-coarsely-measured","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=1371","title":{"rendered":"Scientific impact, coarsely measured"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently at work, a new person we are hiring was described as having a high &#8220;h-index&#8221;.  I had never heard of this term, so I looked it up later.  The <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/H-index\">h-index<\/a> is short for Hirsch index and was proposed by Jorge E. Hirsch as a method for quantitatively characterizing scientific impact through publications.  It is defined as:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nA scientist has index h if h of [his\/her] Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np &#8211;  h) papers have at most h citations each.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Intrigued, I went off and calculated my own h-index, which (using citation data from Google scholar) is 12:<br \/>\n<center><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/h-index.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/h-index.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"h-index\" width=\"261\" height=\"206\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1372\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/h-index.png 1044w, https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/h-index-300x236.png 300w, https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/h-index-1024x807.png 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 261px) 100vw, 261px\" \/><\/a><\/center><br \/>\nAccording to the wikipedia entry on the h-index, that&#8217;s a decent score for use in &#8220;tenure decisions&#8221;, while getting up to about 18 might rate a full professorship.  Of course, this is a coarse metric with (like all other simple metrics) its drawbacks.  It doesn&#8217;t factor in the number of other authors on the paper, or whether the citations are self-citations, or how the paper is cited (in a substantive manner vs. a member of a long list of work cited in the introduction).  But who doesn&#8217;t enjoy a moment of quantitative navel-gazing?  Calculate away!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently at work, a new person we are hiring was described as having a high &#8220;h-index&#8221;. I had never heard of this term, so I looked it up later. The h-index is short for Hirsch index and was proposed by Jorge E. Hirsch as a method for quantitatively characterizing scientific impact through publications. It is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13,55],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1371"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5438,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371\/revisions\/5438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}