Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 8, 2026

Design, Fabrication, and Administration of the Hand Active Sensation Test (HASTe)
Published on: September 8, 2015
The h index and career assessment by numbers
Clint D Kelly1, Michael D Jennions
1School of Botany & Zoology, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. Clint.Kelly@anu.edu.au
Abstract:
Growing demand to quantify the research output from public funding has tempted funding agencies, promotion committees and employers to treat numerical indices of research output more seriously. So many assessment exercises are now conducted worldwide that traditional peer assessment is threatened. Here, we describe a new citation-based index (Hirsh's h index) and examine several factors that might influence it for ecologists and evolutionary biologists, such as gender, country of residence, subdiscipline and total publication output. We suggest that h is not obviously superior to other indices that rely on citations and publication counts to assess research performance.
Related Concept Videos
Measures of Central Tendency
Review and Preview
Percentiles are a type of fractile that partition data into...
Quantifying Work
Percentile
z Scores and Area Under the Curve
Confidence Coefficient