Citations Per Paper

Academic citation impact: h-index and friends

Back in 2005, Hirsch came up with the h-index: you have an h-index of h when h of your papers each pull in at least h citations. Google Scholar leans on the i10-index instead, which just counts papers that have 10 or more citations. Say you have 30 papers with citations [50, 40, 25, 20, 15, 10, 8, 7, 5, …]. That gives an h-index of 7, because seven papers sit at ≥7 citations. If you want something blunter, divide citations by papers: 1,500 citations over 30 papers is 50 citations/paper. There's also the m-quotient, which is h-index ÷ years since your first publication and helps put junior and senior researchers on the same footing. For a sense of scale, the average physicist lands around h ≈ 12, a full professor somewhere in the 18-30 range, and a Nobel laureate at 35 or above. Einstein is estimated at h ≈ 91, and top Brazilian researchers like Wille Soares Cardoso clear h > 100. Bear in mind that co-authorship pads the raw counts, which is why weighted variants exist.

Applications

You'll run into these numbers in CAPES evaluation, full-professor competitions, your ResearchGate score, the Lattes CV (Brazil's official platform), grant applications, tenure review and Google Scholar profiles.

FAQ

Is h-index comparable across fields? No. Biomedicine cites heavily while mathematics cites sparingly, so keep comparisons inside the same area.

Does Web of Science give the same h-index as Google Scholar? No. Scholar pulls in preprints, theses and citations from venues that aren't indexed, so its figure usually runs higher.

Can h-index decrease? In theory it shouldn't, since citations only pile up. In practice, a retraction or a record that gets removed can drag it back down.