{"id":8067,"date":"2014-03-19T19:36:41","date_gmt":"2014-03-19T19:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/03\/19\/what-is-the-h-index\/"},"modified":"2014-03-19T19:36:41","modified_gmt":"2014-03-19T19:36:41","slug":"what-is-the-h-index","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/03\/19\/what-is-the-h-index\/","title":{"rendered":"What is the H Index?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A U. K. reader made mention in an e-mail of a feminist philosopher with a high H index. <\/span><\/p>\n

"What is this? It's a measure of citation apparently. Is that good? Or is it a bunch of useless people citing each other — a sort of walled garden? Interested in your thoughts."<\/span><\/p>\n

To tell the truth, it wasn't until this afternoon that I had even heard of it.  A metric like this is the kind of thing that excites status-obsessed careerists and gatekeepers like Ladder Man, a. k. a. Brian Leiter,  who is so-called because of his obsession with rankings and ratings.  Can you imagine a real philosopher such as Spinoza caring about these trappings of professionalism gone wild?<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is the way I understand it.  Let N be the total number of a scientist's or scholar's publications.  A scientist or scholar has index<\/em> h if<\/em> h of his N publications<\/em> have at least<\/em> h citations each, and the other (<\/em>N \u2212 <\/em>h) publications have no more than<\/em> h citations each. <\/em> (See here<\/a>.)
<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

To illustrate, I will use myself as an example and attempt to calculate my h value based on the data provided by Google Scholar here<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Publication #1  (Dialectica) 41 citations<\/span>
#2 (Nous) 39 citations<\/span>
#3 (Kluwer book) 23 citations<\/span>
#4 (Analysis) 16 citations<\/span>
#5 (Monist) 13 citations<\/span>
#6 (Faith and Philosophy) 10 citations<\/span>
#7 (Modern Schoolman) 9 citations<\/span>
#8 (Faith and Philosophy) 8 citations<\/span>
_____________________________<\/span><\/p>\n

#9 (International Philosophical Quarterly) 8 citations<\/span>
#10 (History of Philosophy Quarterly) 7 citations<\/span><\/p>\n

and so on, with all the rest of my 50 or so publications having no more than 8 citations each.<\/span><\/p>\n

The value of h for me is 8 because 8 of my publications have at least 8 citations each and the rest have no more than 8 citations each.  If I had published only #1, then h would be 1.  If I had published only the first two, then my h would be 2 because each has at least two citations.  If I had published only the first three, then my h would be 3 because each of the three has been cited at least three times.  And so on.  If I had published only the first eight, then my h would still be 8.  <\/span><\/p>\n

So does this make me a better philosopher than Edmund Gettier?  He published exactly one very short philosophical paper.  H for him is 1.  Am I eight times better than him? And what does 'better' mean?  More influential?    Then he is better than me.  But influential on whom?  Is 'influential' a descriptive or a descriptive-cum-normative predicate?  Gettier cooked up a counterexample to the justified-true-belief analysis of propositional knowledge.  How important is that whole debate?  Nietzsche and Ayn Rand are highly influential.  Is that good or bad?<\/span><\/p>\n

Socrates is supposed not to have published anything.  His h = 0.  Socrates Jones over at Whatsammatta U. is his latter-day acolyte.  So far he has published nothing and may never publish anything.  But he is an inspiring teacher and as keen a dialectician as the master himself with many of the same moral attributes. <\/span><\/p>\n

But poor Socrates Jones was denied tenure despite his philosophical gifts because the lunkheads who evaluated him, lacking phronesis<\/a> and obsessed with the calculable, and needing to justify themselves to know-nothing administrators, were obsessed with a dubious and well-nigh meaningless metric.<\/span><\/p>\n

More needs to be said on this topic, much more.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A U. K. reader made mention in an e-mail of a feminist philosopher with a high H index. "What is this? It's a measure of citation apparently. Is that good? Or is it a bunch of useless people citing each other — a sort of walled garden? Interested in your thoughts." To tell the truth, … Continue reading “What is the H Index?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8067\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}