After two years of number-crunching in his cluttered office at UC San Diego, Hirsch had it—an invention important enough to warrant publication in the (very prestigious) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In his 2005 article, Hirsch introduced the h-index (named after himself, of course). The key was focusing not on where you published but on how many times other researchers cited your work. In practice, you take all the papers you've published and rank them by how many times each has been cited. Say paper number one has been cited 10,000 times. Paper number two, 8,000 cites. Paper number 32 has 33 citations, but number 33 has received just 28. You've published 32 papers with more than 32 citations—your h-index is 32.
Or to put it more technically, the h-index is the number n of a researcher's papers that have been cited by other papers at least n times. High numbers = important science = important scientist.
Ronda Wery on 04 Aug 09In an era where we have nearly unlimited amounts of information, one of the key issues is how to separate the good from the bad, the reliable from the unreliable, the trustworthy from the untrustworthy, the useful from the irrelevant. Unless we get this right, the emerging diverse media ecosystem won't work well, if at all.\n\nI've long believed that we'll need to find ways to combine popularity - a valuable metric in itself - with reputation. This sounds easier than it is, because reputation is an enormously complex problem. But whoever gets this right is going to be a huge winner in the marketplace.