Notes on the h-index of an author

What is an h-index of an Author?

As Jorge E. Hirsch [1], the creator of the h-index describes it, the index h is “the number
of papers with citation number ≥*h.*” While this formula might not explain much, it
makes it clear a researcher is perfectly able to calculate their h-index. Here are some
helpful guides that will give you more insight on how to calculate the h-index.

How to calculate the h-index?

An author has published many articles and has been cited with N citations distributed
among his articles. The h-index can be calculated as follows.

1. The citations corresponding to each article should be ordered in a descending manner.

2. Assign a number list corresponding to the ordered articles.

3. The h-index can be found when the assigned number is equal or greater than specified
citations.

Examples to calculate the h-index

Example 1

An author has published 10 articles and has been cited with 50 citations distributed
among his articles as follows: 15, 23, 0, 0, 7, 4, 1, 0, 0, and 0. what is the h-index of this
author?

Solution:

1. The citations corresponding to each article should be ordered in a descending manner.

23
15
7
4
1
0
0
0
0
0
 2. Assign a number list corresponding to the ordered articles.

1 23
2 15
3 7
4 4
5 1
6 0
7 0
8 0
9 0
10 0

3. The h-index can be found when the assigned number is equal or greater than specified
citations. In this case, the h-index is equal to 4.

Example 2

Two authors, A and B, have published their articles with the corresponding citations of
75, and 40, respectively distributed as follows:

Authors A 35 0 1 2 2 2 3 0 30
Authors B 2 1 6 6 5 7 13 0 0

What is the h-index of each author?

Solution:

1. The citations corresponding to each article should be ordered in a descending manner.

Authors A Authors B
35 13
30 7
3 6
2 6
2 5
2 2
1 1
0 0
0 0

2. Assign a number list corresponding to the ordered articles.

Authors A Authors B
1 35 13
2 30 7
3 3 6
4 2 6
5 2 5
6 2 2
7 1 1
8 0 0
9 0 0

3. The h-index of author A is equal to 3, while that of author B is equal to 5, despite the
number of citations of author A is greater than that of author B.

References

[1] Hirsch, Jorge E. "An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output."
Proceedings of the National academy of Sciences 102.46 (2005): 16569-16572.