Michael Schwartzbach’s web page for computing H-numbers has not been working for many weeks. It seems that Google has blocked the service, presumably because it was submitting too many queries to Google Scholar.

The H-number or H-index is a measure of a researcher’s productivity defined by Jorge Hirsch of UCSD. Your H-number is N if you have published N papers with at least N citations each. Of course, you are really interested in the largest N for which this is true. The idea behind this metric is to balance the measures of (1) having a lot of papers with citations and (2) having papers that made an impact, as evidenced by having many citations.

Michael’s page suggests that people use Publish or Perish, a (windows only ) application available from Harzing.com. Since this runs locally on each user’s machine, it avoids the risk of being blocked by Google for issuing too many queries. In addition to computing an author’s H-number, the application generates other statistics involving publications.

Categories: Uncategorized, , Related posts: • This Thanksgiving Do Some Blog Reading;  • Using Google Scholar for citation counting and linking;  • Google Scholar, it’s a good thing;   Comments: 2