Impact Factor and h-Index

 1 December 2011 :

Prepared by Husriati Hussain (Librarian, Reference & Research Division) 

Impact Factor:

n  The only quantitative way of ranking a journal

n  A quantitative measure of the frequency with which the "average article" published in a given scholarly journal has been cited in a particular year or period.

n  Is used in citation analysis

n  It is calculated each year by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for those journals which it tracks, and are published in the Journal Citation Report.

n  Impact Factors have a huge, but controversial, influence on the way published scientific research is perceived and evaluated

h-Index:

The h-index is an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index can also be applied to the productivity and impact of a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UCSD, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.

Posted in: Librarians' Point of View