H-Index Calculator

The h-index, proposed by physicist Jorge Hirsch in 2005, measures both how much you publish and how often that work is cited. You have an h-index of h if h of your papers each have at least h citations. A researcher with an h-index of 20 has 20 papers that have each been cited 20 or more times.

Sort your papers from most to least cited. Walk down the list and find the largest position number that is still less than or equal to that paper's citation count. That position is your h-index. For example, with citations of 10, 8, 5, 4, and 3, the fourth paper has 4 citations (4 is at least 4) but the fifth has only 3, so the h-index is 4.

Enter the total number of citations each of your papers has received, one value per paper, separated by commas, spaces, or new lines. You can pull these counts from Google Scholar, Scopus, or Web of Science. Include papers with zero citations if you want a complete picture, since they do not change the h-index but do affect totals and averages.

The i10-index, used by Google Scholar, is simply the number of your papers with at least 10 citations. The g-index, defined by Leo Egghe in 2006, is the largest number g where your top g papers together have at least g squared citations, so it gives extra weight to highly cited work. This calculator caps the g-index at your paper count rather than padding the list with zero-citation papers.

Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science each index a different set of journals, conferences, and citing documents, so the citation count for the same paper can vary widely between them. Google Scholar usually reports the highest h-index because it counts the broadest range of sources. Enter the counts from a single database to get an h-index consistent with that source.

Not on its own. The h-index favors researchers with long careers and large output, and it cannot exceed your total number of papers, so early-career scientists are naturally limited. It also ignores author order, field-specific citation rates, and a few very influential papers. Use it as one signal among several, not as a single score of research quality.