I think "the person with high impact on society and humanity" is the person that we all tend to give the scientist as a rank to, but in the real world the scientist is somebody that has several years of research and scientific achievements in background and also he/she achieves solution for problems by logical means.
In fact "the person with high in impact on society and humanity" can even be an illiterate, as we can even enumerate several of such by looking back in the history of every country, the people who didn't even go to school but were able to change the life of millions by doing something courageous or by hardworking throughout their life.
Neither public notice or H-Index are indicative of the actual scientific ability of the given person.
A scientist may do strong work in a niche field that gets few citations, but that does not mean that the work is scientific. People who get lots of public recognition sometimes turn out to be practitioners of bad science. Think Fleishman and Pons.
A scientist is someone who uses the scientific method -- systematic observation, measurement, experimentation, and the reaching of conclusions based on evidence.
If good h index corresponding to the high social value and impact and vice-versa, I think that person might be a good scientist.
:)
I think H-index, I-index etc are the psychological motivational factor for the person who is interested in research. Real scientists don't care about any index they concentrate on their research only.
Respectful Isaac Karimi,
Thank you for this question. In fact, citations take years to accumulate so the h-index doesn’t have much discriminatory power for young scholars. Hence, I think h-index can’t be used to compare researchers at different stages of their careers.
Furthermore, the h-index ignores science that isn’t a journal article. In another word, Your h-index can’t capture if you’ve had a tremendous influence on public policy or in improving global health outcomes. That doesn’t seem smart !!! Also, research contributions might be too many and too varied to be summed up in a single number!
In the end, I think there is an important question that must be asked here, how should we use the h-index ??
All bibliometrics are new TOOLS to make "workers" not "thinkers" or "scientists". The majority of well-defined scientists are players who headed by their balls OR their head ?
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