Which fields drive the h-index?

Published

September 16, 2024

Title

Which fields drive the h-index?

Authors

Paolo Giudici, Luca Boscolo.

DOI

10.62684/FSOZ4761

Keywords

H-index, Poisson models, Scaling

Paolo Giudici^(a), Luca Boscolo^(b).

^(a) Department of Economics and Management Sciences, University of Pavia, Italy

^(b) Top Italian Scientists founder.

Abstract

The measurement of the quality of academic research is often done by means of the h-index measure. Although widely accepted, the h-index has some issues and, in particular, it may depend on the scientific field in which a researcher operates. To date there is not a definitive answer as to whether this difference holds, and to what extent it varies. To fill the gap, we propose to operationaly measure the difference in h-index across the sectors of a relatively homogeneous population of all scientists of a nation. To answer the heterogeneity issue we apply three different explainable machine learning models: linear regression, Poisson regression and tree models. Our results show that the latter two models better explain the data. They show that the only sectors for which a difference in h-index is significant are Physics, Biology and Clinical Sciences.

Declarations

Conflict of Interest

The Authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.