Word.ws English Dictionary

h-index

h-index noun: an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and the citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar, based on a set of most cited papers and the number of citations in other publications.

Noun

h-index

  1. An author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and the citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar, based on a set of most cited papers and the number of citations in other publications.
    • A h-index of 10 means that a researcher has published 10 papers that were cited at least ten times.2020, Alan Kelly, How Scientists Communicate […] , Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 196

Origin of h-index

The h stands for “highly cited” and Hirsch, since the metric was suggested in 2005 by physicist Jorge E. Hirsch.

Questions about h-index

What does h-index mean?
H-index means an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and the citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar, based on a set of most cited papers and the number of citations in other publications.
What part of speech is h-index?
H-index is a noun.

Words near h-index in the dictionary

  1. h-dropping
  2. H-field
  3. H-fields
  4. H-hour
  5. H-hours
  6. h-index
  7. H-O-R-S-E
  8. H-piece
  9. H-pieces
  10. H-pop
  11. h-prothesis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: h-index (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “h-index.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/h-index. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.