Impact factor. A theoretical physicist has proposed an index to rank the productivity of scientists by a single number. Named "h" by its creator--Jorge Hirsch of the University of California, San Diego--it is the largest number such that the researcher has h papers with at least h citations. For example, Edward Witten, a string theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, has an h of 110 because 110 papers of his papers have received at least 110 citations. The index favors researchers who produce a stream of influential papers over those who publish many quickly forgotten ones or a few blockbusters. "I can't imagine a person with a high h index who hasn't done important work," says Hirsch, whose own h is 49. Manuel Cardona (h = 86), a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany, says "the great advantage of the index is that you can get it in about 30 seconds" using the ISI Web of Knowledge. However, he says, researchers shouldn't use it as the only measure of their colleagues' performance. The index is described in a preprint posted at www.arxiv.org. The editors suggest the following Related Resources on Science sites: In Science Magazine LETTERS Quantifying Publication Impact Douglass F. Taber (30 September 2005) Science 309 (5744), 2166a. [DOI: 10.1126/science.309.5744.2166a]  |  Full Text »  |  PDF »

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