The Hirsch index

For those of you thinking of having an academic or research career, now is the time to start thinking very seriously about the quality and impact of your track record. My first piece of advice is choose your appellation carefully, and then stick to it from now on. I would recommend choosing something distinctive if possible, e.g., use all the initials in your name (H. P. Bloggs) to separate yourself from all the other H. Bloggs out there.

The next thing to do is always publish in good quality journals and the higher the impact factor, the better. What counts after that of course is the number of citations that your work generates.

I am finding that increasingly reviewers are using a researcher's H-index, first suggested by Jorge E. Hirsch in 2005. The H-index of a researcher is defined as the largest number N for which that researcher has N publications with at least N citations. So say you have 10 publications each with total cites as follows: 600, 50, 10, 7, 7, 7, 2, 1, 1, 1. In this case, your H-index is 6: you have 6 papers with at least 6 citations each, but you don't have 7 papers with at least 7 citations each.

The H-index has a lot of advantages over simply the total number of papers or the total number of citations. It attempts to measure how broad the impact of your work is. There are also some criticisms about using it as a single measure of a researcher's impact. More information can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_number

You can calculate your own H-index by using the Web of Science through the Library website (this is a great tool - in the Library website use the Supersearch facility to find the Web of Science resource) or by using Google Scholar . However don't expect it to be too high just yet; citations take time.