The state of h index research

How does one measure the quality of science? The question is not rhetorical; it is extremely relevant to promotion committees, funding agencies, national academies and politicians, all of whom need a means by which to recognize and reward good research and good researchers. Identifying high‐quality science is necessary for science to progress, but measuring quality becomes even more important in a time when individual scientists and entire research fields increasingly compete for limited amounts of money. The most obvious measure available is the bibliographic record of a scientist or research institute—that is, the number and impact of their publications.> Identifying high‐quality science is necessary for science to progress…Currently, the tool most widely used to determine the quality of scientific publications is the journal impact factor (IF), which is calculated by the scientific division of Thomson Reuters (New York, NY, USA) and is published annually in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The IF itself was developed in the 1960s by Eugene Garfield and Irving H. Sher, who were concerned that simply counting the number of articles a journal published in any given year would miss out small but influential journals in their Science Citation Index (Garfield, 2006). The IF is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year and is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year—for example, 2007—by the total number of articles published in the two previous years—2005 and 2006.Owing to the availability and utility of the IF, promotion committees, funding agencies and scientists have taken to using it as a shorthand assessment of the quality of scientists or institutions, rather than only journals. As Garfield has noted, this use of the IF is often necessary, owing to time …