On the Relationship Between h-index and Citations: An ECS Fellows Case Study

The ever-expanding number of publications in the science community has motivated many investigations on methodologies to assess the impact of the papers and of researchers as authors, with the tradeoff between quality vs. quantity not far behind.1-5 These discussions are enabled by the readily accessible relevant data, which together have renewed the interest in the field of scientometrics. In the 1950s, one of the early researchers of scientometrics, Derek J. de Solla Price, discussed quantifying the quality of research and measuring scientific progress for fields and individuals, including evaluation of his projections for the number of research journals and total articles, namely, the size of science.6,7 With the availability of numerous online databases, along with growing interest in journal impact factors and in citation metrics, came debates on indicators used for citation analysis and metric comparison,5,8-11 authorship criteria,12-14 and hyper-publishing.1,2, 12 While some of these studies have started with simple relationships between h-index and citations for numerous disciplines, some other investigations have focused on indepth analysis to discuss the limitations of the h-index, and or of any single metric for that matter, as a means to measure scientific output or to evaluate the quality of a researcher's work.

Automated summary

The increasing number of publications in the science community has led to research on methodologies to assess the impact of papers and researchers, with a focus on the tradeoff between quality and quantity. The field of scientometrics has been revived with readily accessible data and debates on indicators, authorship criteria, and hyper-publishing. Some studies have explored the relationship between the h-index and citations, while others have delved into the limitations of using single metrics to measure scientific output or evaluate researchers' work.