Scholar Indices and Impact

Scholar indices are used to measure the contributions of scholars to their fields of research. Since the 2005 paper of Jorge E. Hirsch, the use of scholar indices has increased.

Sometimes called bibliometrics, scholar indices are mathematical and statistical tools that measure the significance of the contributions made by an academic to their field of research. Scholar indices may incorporate other assessments such as citation tracking and journal ranking.

Any aggregator of citations and references, could, given time, money and inclination, generate their own set of scholar indices. Publishers who are prominent in this field include Elsevier and Thomson Reuters.

Commercial software which use parsers and web search engines to generate sets of scholar indices or individual results are now available. Examples are: Publish or Perish; 'ScholarIndex'; 'Scopus' and 'Google Scholar'.

Each software vendor primarily uses its own data as well as journals, publications, authority files, indexes, and subject categories to produce sets of scholar indices.

While some companies provide the data and the evaluated metrics as free downloads, others require subscriptions to cover costs of manufacture and upkeep of an efficient parser, search engine and document database.

Scholar indices allow choice of journal collections, application of research funds, ranking of journals and the determination of significant contributors in a subject area.

Advocates of scholar indices recommend their use in areas such as liaison services, references, instruction and collection management.

Critics of the use of scholar indices cite their limitations due to issues of accuracy, validity and applicability and debate their application to hiring, tenure, funding, award giving and membership decisions.

Although scholar indices may not completely describe the impact of an individual researcher's work, some academics will determine their own scholar indices to include in promotional material and curriculum vita for example. Others may study their scholar indices simply for their own sake.

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