104
votes
What are some examples of famous scholars with low h-index?
You can find a lot of historical examples, from people whose careers predated the publish-or-perish culture. A striking more recent example is Peter Higgs, who was awarded (among other honors) the ...
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76
votes
What are some examples of famous scholars with low h-index?
Here are a few contemporary mathematicians who solved major open problems and have relatively low h-index, computed using citation data MathSciNet, for their stature in the mathematical community:
...
- 32.7k
73
votes
What is a common way to tell if an academic is "above average," or outstanding in their field? Is their h-index (Hirsh index) one of them?
Yes, there is one and only one standard method that is universally employed by reputable academic institutions worldwide. This is how you evaluate a researcher:
Read their papers.
Attend one of ...
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68
votes
Accepted
Why did SoftwareX’ impact factor drop from 4.5 SJR to 0.4 last year?
I think this is a good example of putting too much faith in an average measure like Impact Factor or SJR when you talk about the 'reputation' of a journal.
In 2015, in its first year, SoftwareX ...
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61
votes
My h-index is very low and I want to increase it
Write papers that people will want to cite. In particular:
When you come up with a new concept/technique, write a good explanatory section, so that people will refer to your paper for in depth ...
- 5,636
33
votes
Why do universities place so much importance on citation counts and impact factors when evaluating researchers?
Because it's easy
Let's say you got 100 researchers to evaluate. How would you go about doing it? You could read their papers in sufficient detail to understand them (would take months or years, ...
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32
votes
How to survive in the academic world: focus entirely on top-tier results, or spend effort on lower-tier results to boost h-index?
There are two separate points here.
First:
However, based on their criteria, it seems that I have already been eliminated from consideration before the committee has even reviewed my resume.
It may ...
- 27.5k
30
votes
Accepted
Can [edit: or should] a scientist's h-index decrease in the case highly cited publications are retracted?
The h-index is defined mathematically based on the number of publications and citations. So the only question is what data source you are using to calculate the h-index. If that source removes ...
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28
votes
How to remove citations from Google Scholar profile?
You can't.
Google Scholar, like everything Google, does not curate the data. It only indexes them and makes them easy to search through. If the citing document is online it'll be counted as a ...
- 27.2k
26
votes
Accepted
Is there an official, widely used subject classification?
In addition to the ones @Coder suggests, perhaps the library classification systems:
Library of Congress
Dewey Decimal
Universal Decimal Classification
might be useful?
As @tonysdg says below, ...
- 4,978
26
votes
What is a common way to tell if an academic is "above average," or outstanding in their field? Is their h-index (Hirsh index) one of them?
If one claimed that a particular scholar was "above average" or "noted" in their field, is there any good metric by which to support or deny such a claim?
No. As a rule of thumb, this isn't the kind ...
- 299
22
votes
Choosing a PI for my MS/PhD degree in EE based on the h-index?
The only apparent difference between the two being h-index means you don't know enough about these two PIs. Work habits, advising styles, perspectives on the roles of their students...all of these ...
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18
votes
How to survive in the academic world: focus entirely on top-tier results, or spend effort on lower-tier results to boost h-index?
First of, realize that you are currently drawing a lot of conclusions from a single data point. In this one specific job search the committee valued the number of publications and h-index higher than ...
- 137k
17
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between all of these impact factors?
They are fake impact factors, or bogus impact factors.
For instance, the first two you name (Universal Impact Factor, or UIF, and Global Impact Factor, or GIF) were identified as fake impact factors ...
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17
votes
Can Chinese "scientists who publish in the top Western journals... earn in excess of $100,000 per paper" via cash-per-publication incentives?
There is likely more up-to-date information to be found, but the 2017 paper Wei Quan, Bikun Chen, Fei Shu Publish or impoverish: An investigation of the monetary reward system of science in China (...
- 27.9k
16
votes
How to evaluate researchers?
Where I work, everyone is evaluated according to some metrics. There are tons of metrics, from the number of articles, impact factors of the articles, citations, patents, grant money obtained, number ...
- 1,258
15
votes
What are some examples of famous scholars with low h-index?
Ernst Ising probably counts. He did his PhD thesis on the (now well-known) model that bears his name, but didn't work in physics for decades afterwards. Though he eventually became a physics professor,...
- 134k
14
votes
What other models are in use for evaluating faculty candidates?
Here's what my department will do before offering you a tenure-track or tenured position: Our personnel committee will get informal opinions about you from colleagues in or near your area. You will be ...
- 22.2k
14
votes
How do mathematicians rank other mathematicians?
Badly. Ranking people on producing useful things does not work with any kind of accuracy. It only works for games and sports because they are specifically designed to rank people. Even then, the ...
- 99.9k
13
votes
Is there an official, widely used subject classification?
These are the possible classification that you could look at:
Google Scholar --> Metric (a link on the top of the page) --> scroll down to 'view top publications' --> Click categories --> ... explore ...
- 12.9k
13
votes
Accepted
Is a paper with no citations likely to contribute to citation metrics in a way which reduces my job prospects?
No, this is not a problem. Everyone has papers on their CV which have few citations, including older papers. If this were true for all your papers, in particular even all of those which are several ...
- 6,089
12
votes
What other models are in use for evaluating faculty candidates?
At my institution (a research-intensive Canadian university), the "evidence of scholarship" component of assessment for tenure and promotion is not based closely on numeric summaries of ...
- 5,081
12
votes
Can Chinese "scientists who publish in the top Western journals... earn in excess of $100,000 per paper" via cash-per-publication incentives?
Personal cash rewards existed and other forms of rewards (e.g. funding preferences) still exist. But the number should be contexualized.
Rewards in excess of 30000 USD are not for any top "...
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11
votes
How is the Scimago journal ranking (Q1-Q4) defined?
Q1 to Q4 refer to journal ranking quartiles within a subdiscipline using the SJR citation index.
Thus, a first quartile journal (i.e., Q1) has an SJR in the top 25% of journals for at least one of ...
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11
votes
What are some examples of famous scholars with low h-index?
How about a physicist, Erich Hückel, who created Huckel theory and one of the founding fathers of Molecular-Orbital theory / quantum chemistry.
He was definitely someone who struggled in academia even ...
- 3,029
11
votes
Why do universities place so much importance on citation counts and impact factors when evaluating researchers?
Because many funding agencies give a lot of weight to citations and impact factor,
Because many ranking agencies (of all sorts) will give higher rankings to institutions with research-active and well-...
- 27.5k
11
votes
Why are not more sophisticated algorithms used to handle the fake paper problem of the science?
I don't believe there is an objective, quantitative/algorithmic way to solve this problem. The systems for "gaming" that you refer to exist because those things are used as quantitative ...
- 127k
10
votes
How is an experimental particle physicist evaluated?
I happened to be a member of my college's executive committee when an experimental particle physicist was being considered for promotion to tenure. She was, indeed, a member of a huge collaboration, ...
- 22.2k
10
votes
Reputed journal publications, yet I have small number of citations
First, let's forget the number of citations in the predatory journals, since they are fraudulent trash and no conclusions can be drawn from them.
Let us instead focus on why some work gets well cited ...
- 190k
10
votes
What would be the acceptable procedure (if any) for creating a Google Scholar page for someone else?
The pages for Feynman, Einstein, and others (probably including Freud) were set up manually by the team behind Google Scholar back before the service launched in 2011, as evidenced by this blog post. ...
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Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible