If you're an academic and you have not checked your h-index, it is about time you do so. If you do not know what the h-index is, it is about time you found out.

The h-index, or Hirsch index, is a sort of personal impact factor, based on citations of published work. It’s an attempt to measure both the scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other people's publications. The index was suggested by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UCSD, as a tool for determining relative quality and is therefore sometimes called the Hirsch index. Hirsch analyzed many different metrics for evaluating scientific impact and proposed the number h, where h papers have been cited at least h times as a useful metric of the cumulative impact of an individual scientist’s work. The h-index squashes the effects of a few jackpot papers, as well as the effects of large numbers of uncited publications, compared to more simple metrics such as number of citations or number of papers. A sustained quality effort is required to make your h-index grow.

Gleb’s h-index means that he has 50 papers that now have been cited for at least 50 times. In materials science or physics a good scientist tends to have an h–index equal to his number of publishing years. Gleb’s has been publishing only for 16 years. In other words, he outperforms the average materials scientist by more than a factor of three!

If you are interested to find out what your h-index is go to http://wok.mimas.ac.uk