New Metric for Faculty Impact
An article in the August 2007 issue of Nature, “Achievement Index Climbs the Ranks” by Philip Ball, discusses the “h-index,” a metric proposed by Jorge Hirsch at UC San Diego that ranks researchers by the number n of their papers that have all received at least n citations. Under this ranking index, Deborah Estrin of UCLA’s Computer Science Department has been ranked number two worldwide in the field of computer science. Her score of “68″ means that sixty-eight of her papers have been cited at least sixty-eight times each. Proponents of the h-index feel that it is substantially better than other indices and that it even predicts future productivity better than does a record of past productivity.
