Is Hirsch's H the Best Predictor of the Number of a Researcher's Extremely Highly Cited Articles?

摘要

Ruscio et al. (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) have provided an impressively comprehensive conceptual and empirical psychometric analysis of 22 modern-day citation measures. Their analyses show that although numerous measures have been developed to ameliorate perceived limitations of Hirsch's (2005) h index (which is perhaps the most prevalent measure used to evaluate academic productivity and is defined as the largest number h such that at least h articles are cited at least h times), they are not superior to h (and are redundant with h because they are highly correlated with it). Because these other measures often suffer from being conceptually opaque and difficult to compute, and because h is determined by both the quantity and impact of a faculty member's publications, Ruscio et al. endorse using h to evaluate the scholarly impact of a person (or a variation on h to evaluate a department's or university's scholarly impact).