Cover Story: New Feature Alert

Scopus brings automatic generation of the h-index to the desktop

Providing Users with a Simple Metric Indicating an Author’s Scientific Influence

The h-index is rapidly gaining recognition and acceptance as a new and simple metric that increases the quality and reliability of quantitative research performance measurement.

Developer of the h-index, Jorge Hirsch from the University of California, San Diego, says, "Citation counts get used for research evaluation in faculty recruiting and promotion, as well as in grant allocations. I am convinced that articles that receive large numbers of citations should be considered as significant in such evaluations, even when they are not published in highly ranked ("high impact") journals. Partly because of my own experience of having difficulty publishing my research in highly ranked journals, I was interested in finding a simple metric that could clearly illustrate research achievement independent of the vagaries associated with publishing. This is why I developed the h-index."

The h-index has recently been incorporated into Scopus and includes visual aids to assist in interpreting consistency and relevance. The index considers the publication records of an individual, the number of papers published over n years and the number of citations for each paper. The result is a single number, the “h-index.” To provide the user with additional clarity Scopus has included a set of visual aids that generate a transparent overview of citation and publication patterns over time; revealing whether the h-index is dependent on a few highly cited papers or that the author’s papers have a relatively consistent volume of citations.

Peter Brimblecombe, Professor in Atmospheric Chemistry at the School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia and Editor-in-Chief of Atmospheric Environment, is a frequent user of the h-index in order to evaluate individual and institutional performance. “The h-index is a useful first step in evaluation before looking at published output in greater detail and a useful measure of cumulative impact, because it avoids the long trail of recent or poorly cited papers.”

The h-index in Scopus will be automatically computed for individual authors and for collections of articles selected by the user. The metric quantifies the impact and relevance of an individual scientist’s research output by looking at the distribution of citations received by his or her publications and is seen as one of the simplest metrics available for objective analysis.

“Assessing scientific research output is moving increasingly from the traditional journal level metrics to include metrics at the author level,” said Jaco Zijlstra, Scopus Director. “This important new feature in Scopus will help researchers, department heads and administrators gain an unbiased impression of an individual’s research performance.”

Additional Reading:
"An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output," PNAS 102(46):16569-16572, November 15 2005.
Library Connect Pamphlet #9 Edition 1, Elsevier, 2006.

Visit www.info.scopus.com to view the Scopus h-index video.