Four problems of the h-index for assessing the research productivity and impact of individual authors

Abstract

AbstractThis paper reveals that when the h-index is used to assess the research productivity and impact of individual authors, four major problems exist because the h-index does not take into account the number of authors in each publication. This paper shows that the fractional h-index (or the individual hi-index in this paper), which distributes each publication’s received citations among its authors, can solve these problems effectively. This paper recommends that websites (such as scholar.google.com and researchgate.net) should add the hi-index for the sake of building a fairer and more ethical research community.