The inconsistency of the h‐index is a research paper published in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2011). On theSindex it has a DataRank of 0.870. It has been cited 330 times.
AbstractThe h‐index is a popular bibliometric indicator for assessing individual scientists. We criticize the h‐index from a theoretical point of view. We argue that for the purpose of measuring the overall scientific impact of a scientist (or some other unit of analysis), the h‐index behaves in a counterintuitive way. In certain cases, the mechanism used by the h‐index to aggregate publication and citation statistics into a single number leads to inconsistencies in the way in which scientists are ranked. Our conclusion is that the h‐index cannot be considered an appropriate indicator of a scientist's overall scientific impact. Based on recent theoretical insights, we discuss what kind of indicators can be used as an alternative to the h‐index. We pay special attention to the highly cited publications indicator. This indicator has a lot in common with the h‐index, but unlike the h‐index it does not produce inconsistent rankings.
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Base Score Contribution
0.870
From this paper's citation signal
Citation Network Contribution
0
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Learn more about DataRank methodology →DataRank blends this paper's own citation count with the influence of the papers that cite it. Here, roughly 100% comes from its base citations and 0% from the citation network.
Citers are pulled from OpenAlex sorted by cited_by_count:descand capped per paper, so when the cap binds we keep the highest-signal references and the score is reproducible across reruns.