The h-index is no longer an effective correlate of scientific reputation

The impact of individual scientists is commonly quantified using citation-based measures. The most common such measure is the h-index. A scientist’s h-index affects hiring, promotion, and funding decisions, and thus shapes the progress of science. Here we report a large-scale study of scientometric...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one Vol. 16; no. 6; p. e0253397
Main Authors: Koltun, Vladlen, Hafner, David
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: San Francisco Public Library of Science 28-06-2021
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects:
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The impact of individual scientists is commonly quantified using citation-based measures. The most common such measure is the h-index. A scientist’s h-index affects hiring, promotion, and funding decisions, and thus shapes the progress of science. Here we report a large-scale study of scientometric measures, analyzing millions of articles and hundreds of millions of citations across four scientific fields and two data platforms. We find that the correlation of the h-index with awards that indicate recognition by the scientific community has substantially declined. These trends are associated with changing authorship patterns. We show that these declines can be mitigated by fractional allocation of citations among authors, which has been discussed in the literature but not implemented at scale. We find that a fractional analogue of the h-index outperforms other measures as a correlate and predictor of scientific awards. Our results suggest that the use of the h-index in ranking scientists should be reconsidered, and that fractional allocation measures such as h-frac provide more robust alternatives.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
Competing Interests: The authors were supported by Intel Corporation. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0253397