Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

Autor/inn/en	Kamrani, Pantea; Dorsch, Isabelle; Stock, Wolfgang G.
Titel	Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?
Quelle	In: Scientometrics, (2021) 7, S.5489-5508 PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0138-9130
DOI	10.1007/s11192-021-03968-1
Schlagwörter	H-Index; Bibliometrics; Researchers; Genders; Generations; Knowledge fields; WoS; Scopus; Google Scholar; M-Index; Metrics literacy
Abstract	Abstract The h-index is a widely used scientometric indicator on the researcher level working with a simple combination of publication and citation counts. In this article, we pursue two goals, namely the collection of empirical data about researchers’ personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as for their academic disciplines, and on the researchers’ concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation. We worked with an online survey (including a knowledge test on the calculation of the h-index), which was finished by 1081 German university professors. We distinguished between the results for all participants, and, additionally, the results by gender, generation, and field of knowledge. We found a clear binary division between the academic knowledge fields: For the sciences and medicine the h-index is important for the researchers themselves and for their disciplines, while for the humanities and social sciences, economics, and law the h-index is considerably less important. Two fifths of the professors do not know details on the h-index or wrongly deem to know what the h-index is and failed our test. The researchers’ knowledge on the h-index is much smaller in the academic branches of the humanities and the social sciences. As the h-index is important for many researchers and as not all researchers are very knowledgeable about this author-specific indicator, it seems to be necessary to make researchers more aware of scholarly metrics literacy.
Erfasst von	OLC
Update	2023/2/05