The Hirsch-Index - Importance in Evaluating a Publication

Bibliographic data have been used for long time to evaluate scientific publications. While the journal impact factor developed by Garfield makes good visibility of publications in journals, the h-index in 2005 proposed by Hirsch has provided a simple measure of the perception of cumulative publication productivity of a scientist. The magnitude of the h-index of a researcher is dependent on the duration of the academic career and the index is also determined by the completeness of the database used to identify the publications and their citations. A major problem of the h-index is that regardless of ranking, all authors of a publication are taken into account in the creation of the h-index of each author. This leads to the distortion of the h-index of authors with a short publication career depending on the height of the h-index of their experienced co-authors. Numerous modifications of the h-index have been published, to compensate for its disadvantages. In 2006, an h-index for journals was proposed. The h-index for journals is dependent on the duration of the publication period and the quality of the used data collection. This is shown for the h-index of the journal, "Physikalische Medizin, Rehabilitationsmedizin, Kurortmedizin" which was determined from the data collections World of Science (WoS), Scopus and Google Scholar (GS). The value of the GS h-index was higher than the h-index in Scopus and WoS. The average difference of h-index from WoS or Scopus was 0.53 +/- 1.12 in favour of Scopus. Another shortcoming of the h-index is favouring journals with many articles to journals with a few contributions. The Hirsch-index is a measure of the visibility of the scientific productivity of authors or journals. The higher the h-index, the more frequent an article of an author or magazine were perceived as citation. A single publication can be identified on the basis of the obtained total citations as belonging the Hirsch-index of an author or journal.