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Scholarly publishing

h-index

A researcher-level metric: the largest number h such that they have h publications each cited at least h times.

An h-index of 12 means twelve papers with twelve or more citations each. It was designed to reward sustained output over both a single famous paper and a long list of ignored ones.

Its weaknesses are structural. It can only rise, so it tracks career length as much as impact; it is field-dependent, since citation norms differ by orders of magnitude between disciplines; it ignores author order and contribution; and it differs depending on whether you compute it from Scopus, Web of Science, or Google Scholar, because they index different things.

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