The impact factor is the most popular measure of research influence. But my colleagues have recently been telling me to start calculating my h index. I find this quite troublesome. Can you tell me if the h index is better than the impact factor?
Dear Bashdar
the impact factor belongs to journal, not person. H index is very important for each researcher.
Presentation Journal Impact Factors, Researcher h-index, How to improve r...
H-index use for a person and can be also calculated for the journal (for example such approach use in GoogleScholar). In this regard, h-index is a more general index than the impact factor, which use for journals. You can see more answer here as well:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_h_index_better_than_the_impact_factor
Dear Bashdar Hussen For journals, Impact factor is the most important criteria. Whereas, for researchers, h- index is the most important one.
I think there is quite well answered responses and thanks for responders.
However if I want to be to the point: all of these metrics are important (even being Open access (OA) which are accessible without cost to readers; consequently, cited more frequently) in a way that created for comparing and ranking and all of them showing their kind efficiency in publication for occupation of better rankings in specific period of time or with specific calculations.
In my opinion, sometimes might, we suppose/treat an specific Journal or Article like Reacher (person) so that to be able to generalize comparing metrics with other comparable factors, interchangeably.
Simply:
First we go with the definitions:
What is definition of H-index:
Defined as "the maximum value of h such that the given author/journal has published h papers that have each been cited at least h times
What is definition of Journal Impact Factor (JIF):
Defined as “a measure of the frequency with which the 'average article' in a journal has cited in a particular year or period in which it calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous 2 years”
What is definition of CiteScore (SCOPUS):
Defined as “the number of citations received by a journal in one year to the number of documents published in the three previous years. For example someone who has H-index = 8 means this researcher has 8 publication which each of them cited at least 8 times by other articles.
Second we look at the classes of metrics in 3 level :
1) Article-level: this shows how often an article was cited in other articles, books, or other sources in that dependent on the discipline and the number of people working in that area.
2) Journal-level: The simplest journal-level metric is the journal impact factor (JIF) wich published and calculated by Clarivate; other similar metrics, such as the CiteScore (CS) comes from Scopus.
3) Author-level: Total citations, or average citation count per article, can be reported for an individual author and the best-known measures include the h-index.
And unclassified belongs to
4)Alternatives: Sometimes universities or some specific societies define new measurements of metric for scholar's impact which relies on the number of downloads from publishers and analyzing citation performance, often at article level. For example, In 2008 the Journal of Medical Internet Research began publishing views and Tweets. These "tweetations" proved to be a good indicator of highly cited articles, leading the author to propose a "Twimpact factor", which is the number of Tweets it receives in the first seven days of publication, as well as a Twindex, which is the rank percentile of an article's Twimpact factor.
Personally I think all we like to compare all things with each other and sometimes we forget the base and compare a journal efficiency with a person (researcher) and I think "Lets respect the metrics basic principals, and compare things with its own definition and set of the published data"
For better sense about these issues please check
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientometrics#Methods_and_findings
Thanks for your attention
Amir Jafari
ref:
Tyler Nix MLIS, ... Jean Song MSI, in Medical and Scientific Publishing, 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_impact
what improves an indicator is whether something is first understood by the world and second if it is more useful...
One cannot compare the value of h index with the impact factor value. The first one concerns a given scientist and the second one concerns a given journal.
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