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"Does the h index have predictive power?"

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Jorge Hirsch continues his work with the h index in the paper: Does the h index have predictive power? in the online PNAS, PNAS | December 4, 2007 | vol. 104 | no. 49 | 19193-19198.

One footnote describes deficiencies with ISI: In using the very valuable ISI resource for individual evaluations, one should keep in mind that it has limitations, e.g., (i) it will, of course, miss citations where the author's name is misspelled; (ii) books, book chapters, and most conference proceedings are not included; (iii) citations to "Rapid Communications" papers in Phys Rev B that include (R) in the citation are currently not counted by ISI.

A diiferent footnote covers the "junior author" matter: Of course, it will often be the case that a junior coauthor will have performed most of the actual work for the paper. Nevertheless, if the paper has senior coauthors and ended up with a large number of citations, it will often be the case that the senior coauthor(s) will have played the crucial role.

In the incident of alleged plagiarism involving K.Y. Cha (Cha related to an organization given a CIRM grant), the original publication was in KJOG, a journal NOT indexed by ISI. There was a motivation to "move up" to Fertility & Sterility, an American journal that IS indexed by ISI.

In "moving up" to Fertility & Sterility, the F&S authors omitted the name of "junior" worker Kim, who actually did the work.

Thus, the Cha/Kim matter illustrates factors that go beyond those covered by Jorge Hirsch.

See also a 2005 post on IPBiz:

The "h index", a new way of ranking authors through citations

Full post as published by IPBiz on June 07, 2008 (boomark / email).