{"id":1300,"date":"2012-09-14T10:50:55","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T10:50:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/?p=1300"},"modified":"2012-09-14T10:57:45","modified_gmt":"2012-09-14T10:57:45","slug":"another-way-to-measure-your-research-impact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2012\/09\/14\/another-way-to-measure-your-research-impact\/","title":{"rendered":"Another way to measure your research impact"},"content":{"rendered":"

The h-index attempts to reduce a researcher’s output to a single number:\u00a0your h-index\u00a0is the number of papers you\u2019ve published, N<\/em>, that have been cited at least N<\/em> times. It seems like a broader measure than pure citation counts but is by no means a perfect measure. It is seen as mostly confirming past successes and it is variable between different subjects. Much has been written<\/a> about it since it was first devised in 2005, and various attempts have been made to improve it.<\/p>\n

A paper in this week’s Nature<\/em> announces a new variant <\/a>– the future h-index. This is designed to predict what your h-index will be a few years in the future, taking into account some additional factors. It seems interesting but still flawed.<\/p>\n

Appearing in such a high-profile venue as Nature<\/em>\u00a0has given this new metric some prominence, and there has been much comment already (e.g. see this piece in The Scientist<\/a><\/em>).\u00a0On Twitter Noah Fierer commented<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In case you were wondering – secret to high H-index = lots of papers in high profile journals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hardly a surprising finding. The Chronicle of Higher Educa<\/em>tion has some further thoughtful comments on the new tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Konrad Kording, one of the authors of the paper in Nature,<\/em>\u00a0said that their future h-index has “proved more than twice as accurate as the h-index for predicting the future success of researchers in the life sciences”.<\/p>\n

But Jorge Hirsch, the inventor of the original h-index\u00a0is not impressed. The Chronicle <\/em>reports<\/p>\n

he said the factors added to his h-index appeared to have little meaningful effect. He suggested the additional factors had been devised by \u201coptimizing the coefficients\u201d for a particular set of authors covered by the paper. He said the predictive powers would not hold up for a wider set of test cases.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That echoes my thought.\u00a0 Publication patterns and citation practices\u00a0vary between fields,\u00a0so basing a general formula on researchers in one particular field is not\u00a0realistic.\u00a0The\u00a0article mentions factors such as the quality of training and the standing of one’s PhD adviser (and\u00a0I would add\u00a0one’s postdoc supervisor and later mentors) but none of these factors are included in the\u00a0new index as they apparently have only a small effect.<\/p>\n

But, hey, everyone knows that these magic numbers are basically just that – a data reduction too far. As Stephen Curry said<\/a> on Twitter:<\/p>\n

scientists invent a new way to screw themselves over<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So I think Wired<\/a> magazine has the best idea:<\/p>\n

while neither one\u2019s h-index nor the predictions of this equation are destiny, playing with this formula certainly is fun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can try the formula <\/a>for yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The h-index attempts to reduce a researcher’s output to a single number:\u00a0your h-index\u00a0is the number of papers you\u2019ve published, N, that have been cited at least N times. It seems like a broader measure than pure citation counts but is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bibliometrics-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}