h-Index: A review focused in its variants, computation and standardization for different scientific fields

The h-index and some related bibliometric indices have received a lot of attention from the scientific community in the last few years due to some of their good properties ( easiness of computation, balance between quantity of publications and their impact and so on). Many different indicators have been developed in order to extend and overcome the drawbacks of the original Hirsch proposal. In this contribution we present a comprehensive review on the h-index and related indicators field. From the initial h-index proposal we study their main advantages, drawbacks and the main applications that we can find in the literature. A description of many of the h-related indices that have been developed along with their main characteristics and some of the works that analyze and compare them are presented. We also review the most up to date standardization studies that allow a fair comparison by means of the h-index among scientists from different research areas and finally, some works that analyze the computation of the h-index and related indices by using different citation databases (ISI Citation Indexes, Google Scholar and Scopus) are introduced. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.