h-Index Determination

The h-index is probably the more popular method of evaluation of the impact of academic research-ers, and several modifications, related indexes or criticisms have been proposed. Also, h-indexes should only be compared for researchers in a same research field, but it is frequently used for com-paring researchers in different fields, greatly in private situations. Here I show in a simple way that when considering the deep significance of individual citation weight, the h-index is self-inconsistent. The calculation procedure for the h-index does not consider the true weight of individual citations, nor the change in the number of published documents and citations per year with time. Thus, an im-portant way of evaluating academic researchers is greatly relying on a index with a inaccurate defini-tion. On the other hand, the relative value of the h-indexes of two researchers working in different science fields is proportional to the square root of the ratio of respective field sizes, and therefore they should not be directly compared.