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The h-index: A case of the tail wagging the dog?

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  • Burrell, Quentin L.

Abstract

From the way that it was initially defined (Hirsch, 2005), the h-index naturally encourages focus on the most highly cited publications of an author and this in turn has led to (predominantly) a rank-based approach to its investigation. However, Hirsch (2005) and Burrell (2007a) both adopted a frequency-based approach leading to general conjectures regarding the relationship between the h-index and the author's publication and citation rates as well as his/her career length. Here we apply the distributional results of Burrell (2007a, 2013b) to three published data sets to show that a good estimate of the h-index can often be obtained knowing only the number of publications and the number of citations. (Exceptions can occur when an author has one or more “outliers” in the upper tail of the citation distribution.) In other words, maybe the main body of the distribution determines the h-index, not the wild wagging of the tail. Furthermore, the simple geometric distribution turns out to be the key.

Suggested Citation

  • Burrell, Quentin L., 2013. "The h-index: A case of the tail wagging the dog?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(4), pages 774-783.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:7:y:2013:i:4:p:774-783
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2013.06.004
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Burrell, Quentin L., 2007. "On the h-index, the size of the Hirsch core and Jin's A-index," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 1(2), pages 170-177.
    2. Leo Egghe & Ronald Rousseau, 2012. "The Hirsch index of a shifted Lotka function and its relation with the impact factor," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(5), pages 1048-1053, May.
    3. Burrell, Quentin L., 2007. "Hirsch's h-index: A stochastic model," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 1(1), pages 16-25.
    4. Quentin L. Burrell, 2013. "Formulae for the h-index: A lack of robustness in Lotkaian informetrics?," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(7), pages 1504-1514, July.
    5. Leo Egghe & Ronald Rousseau, 2006. "An informetric model for the Hirsch-index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 69(1), pages 121-129, October.
    6. Sangwal, Keshra, 2013. "Comparison of different mathematical functions for the analysis of citation distribution of papers of individual authors," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(1), pages 36-49.
    7. Fred Y. Ye, 2009. "An investigation on mathematical models of the h-index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 81(2), pages 493-498, November.
    8. Leo Egghe & Ronald Rousseau, 2012. "The Hirsch index of a shifted Lotka function and its relation with the impact factor," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(5), pages 1048-1053, May.
    9. Rousseau, Ronald & García-Zorita, Carlos & Sanz-Casado, Elias, 2013. "The h-bubble," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 294-300.
    10. Fred Y. Ye, 2011. "A unification of three models for the h-index," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(1), pages 205-207, January.
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    Cited by:

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    2. Bertoli-Barsotti, Lucio & Lando, Tommaso, 2019. "How mean rank and mean size may determine the generalised Lorenz curve: With application to citation analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 387-396.
    3. Brandão, Luana Carneiro & Soares de Mello, João Carlos Correia Baptista, 2019. "A multi-criteria approach to the h-index," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 276(1), pages 357-363.
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    5. Sangwal, Keshra, 2014. "Distributions of citations of papers of individual authors publishing in different scientific disciplines: Application of Langmuir-type function," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(4), pages 972-984.
    6. Leydesdorff, Loet & Bornmann, Lutz, 2021. "Disruption indices and their calculation using web-of-science data: Indicators of historical developments or evolutionary dynamics?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(4).

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