Drawbacks to h-index, as a factor assessing the scientific impact and the scientific credit of a researcher

Abstract

Nowadays, h-index is considered as an important factor to assess the productivity and citation impact of researchers’ publications. Indeed, Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at University of California San Diego, developed and suggested h-index in 2005. At the time, h-index could present a score, which successfully integrated the number of articles and citations for a researcher. Thus, it could simultaneously assess the quality and quantity of a researcher’s total publications. It was also simple and easy to understand. Accordingly, h-index received much attention all around the world and became popular very soon. So that, currently in many scientific societies, it is considered as a factor to compare the scientific impact and credit of researchers. However, h-index has received many criticisms since its introduction. Here, I want to mention some of its defects and weaknesses, as a factor assessing the scientific impact and credit of researchers, from my point of view. However, these defects also has been discussed previously in different manners. Finally, this letter is going to conclude that nowadays, we need a more comprehensive ranking-factor (as an appropriate alternative for h-index) that keeps the advantages of h-index, while lacks its weaknesses.