Over on the ChemConnector blog Antony Williams posted recently on tools to calculate his h-index for citation. Using Web of Science was complicated because of multiple scientists with the same name as him and my poor filtering ended up with well under 30% of his publications. However the calculated h-index was still similar to what he was seeing.
Here is my result (h-index = 36 for 146 publications as of this week) which is I believe definitive as I am the only person with this name as a scientist (that I know of). It will be interesting to see how the methods Antony used compare. Still I do not understand the real relevance of this number, why people obsess about them and its not something I dwell on.
More importantly the implications may be that free methods for calculating this may be as useful as those that are proprietary. I would be interested to see if anyone has collaborated on a large scale comparison of the free versus commercial methods for names that are unique to a single scientist. Could someone not devise a unique author number or ID to get around this problem?
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Adam says:
October 20, 2012 at 3:16 pm (UTC -5)
Hey Sean, yes, you brought up a good point. Take a look at cestagi’s c-index. Much more diverse, and much more accurate since it’s based on your input.