A review on h-index and its alternative indices

• Published in: Journal of information science Vol. 49; no. 3; pp. 624 - 665
• Main Authors: Bihari, Anand, Tripathi, Sudhakar, Deepak, Akshay
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01-06-2023; Bowker-Saur Ltd
• Subjects: Bibliometrics; Citation analysis; Hirsch index; Indicators; Literature reviews; Scientometrics; h-index; Bibliometric indices; scientometrics indices
• ISSN: 0165-5515; 1741-6485
• DOI: 10.1177/01655515211014478

In recent years, several scientometrics and bibliometrics indicators were proposed to evaluate the scientific impact of individuals, institutions, colleges, universities and research teams. The h-index gives a breakthrough in the research community for assessing the scientific impact of an individual. It got a lot of attention due to its simplicity, and several other indicators were proposed to extend the properties of the h-index and to overcome its shortcomings. In this literature review, we have discussed the advantages and limitations of almost all scientometrics and bibliometrics indicators, which have been categorised into seven categories based on their properties: (1) complement of h-index, (2) based on total number of authors, (3) based on publication age, (4) combination of two indices, (5) based on excess citation count, (6) based on total publication count and (7) based on other variants. The primary objective of this article is to study all those indicators which have been proposed to evaluate the scientific impact of an individual researcher or a group of researchers.