Credit: Adapted from Getty
More than half a century ago, information scientist Derek De Solla Price observed that the scientific literature was growing exponentially, doubling every 10–15 years1. Little did he know that this observation would spawn not just a field of study, but an entire industry devoted to counting, measuring, weighing and indexing every aspect of academic output2. Today, the modern academic doesn’t just publish — they generate metrics. They don’t just research — they optimize their h-indices. And they certainly don’t just think up new ideas — they maximize citation counts while maintaining a favourable paper output.
Ultimately, they produce ‘units of assessment’, according to the UK Research Assessment Framework (REF), which the United Kingdom uses to allocate £2 billion (US$2.7 billion) in public research funding across its universities. They don’t collaborate; they strategically co-author, to maximize citation networks. And they certainly don’t read any more — who has time when there are metrics to massage?
The rise of the h-index: when counting became culture
It began innocently enough. Twenty years ago, physicist Jorge Hirsch at the University of California, San Diego, proposed the h-index. It was elegantly simple: a scholar with an h-index of n has published n papers that have each been cited at least n times3. Hirsch’s original paper suggested that “for physics, a value for h of about 10–12 might be a useful guideline for tenure decisions at major research universities”.
Oh, sweet summer child, to quote a popular line from Game of Thrones.
What Hirsch had unleashed was not merely a metric, but a compulsion. Within a decade, the h-index had metastasized across disciplines. And very quickly, rather than a metric, it became a target. Search committees began sorting candidates by h-index; promotion committees set h-index thresholds; graduate students started checking their h-indices with the frequency and anxiety typically reserved for checking a dating app.
An explosion of metrics
But why stop at one number when you could have dozens? The h-index begat the g-index (which gives more weight to highly cited articles)4, which begat the e-index (to account for citations beyond those considered in the h-index), the a-index (to measure the average number of citations in a researcher’s top papers) and the m-index (which takes career length into account). There is now the i10-index (the number of publications with at least ten citations), the h-core (the core set of papers considered by the h-index) and the contemporary h-index (which adds a decay function, because apparently citations should have a half-life).
Each new metric arrived with its own justification, its own formula and its own promise to finally capture the true essence of scholarly impact.
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