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This question arises because I noticed in the past the patent articles in my Google scholar was cited and included in the rank for h-indexing. Since last year, these citations were removed, only to find out that they are included back.

My question, should citation on the patent article be included for h-indexing ?

Note: They can influence a lot with inclusion and without.

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    That depends on whether including patents improves your h-index more than it improves your competitors' h-indices. (Ha ha only serious.) – JeffE Apr 10 at 20:42
  • I just feel it can skew a lot as in my case without the patent citation is h-2 but when included it is h-6. It does not matter to me, just curious. – Karsun Apr 12 at 1:18
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Why not? Patent article is also your work published so it should be included in h-index and all other indices for that matter.

That being said, this is my opinion, not an expert advice (Thanks to @iayork for pointing it out). Discussion in the comments. But the fact that Google Scholar list patents in your profile and their citations are used to calculate h-index, I say it is okay to have patent citations in your h-index.

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  • Is this your opinion, or do you have a reference that indicates that patents are expected to be included in h-indexes? As far as I can see, none of the documentation on h-index says clearly whether patents should be included, but several imply that they should not. – iayork Apr 10 at 18:53
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    I suggest, then, that you edit your answer to indicate that this is simply your opinion. As it is, you seem to be making an authoritative statement. Since other people may be basing job applications or other important goals on this, they may like to know that this is just a guess from someone with no particular knowledge of the subject. – iayork Apr 10 at 19:34
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    Since there are no sincere guidelines on this matter, it came from my experience of sitting in few interview panels. I/we always considered a patent as a proof of productivity, which was also the purpose of h-index anyway. If a person is coming from an industry rather than academia, their patents generally were not accompanied by the scientific publications, so any citations to their patents should be considered in their h-index. – SinghTheCoder Apr 10 at 19:49
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    @iayork Is that what the people who review the CV of the original poster will think? — The subset of people who review OP's CV who also care about h-indices will presumably be comparing OP's h-index with other people in the same field. And then it matters far less whether patents are included or not (or whether citations are counted by Google Scholar or SCI or something else) than that the criteria are transparent and applied consistently. — Is that what the people who invented and who maintain the h-index think? — Who cares? – JeffE Apr 10 at 20:41
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    @jeffe Did you read my comment? All I suggested is that the answer included the point that this is just my opinion. Now that's in the answer, I'll remove my downvote. – iayork Apr 11 at 10:21

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