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. 2014 May;15(3):290-2.
doi: 10.5811/westjem.2013.9.18103. Epub 2013 Nov 5.

Survey of publications and the H-index of Academic Emergency Medicine Professors

Matthew Babineau  1 , Christopher Fischer  1 , Kathryn Volz  1 , Leon D Sanchez  1
Affiliations

Survey of publications and the H-index of Academic Emergency Medicine Professors

Matthew Babineau et al. West J Emerg Med. 2014 May.

Abstract

Introduction: The number of publications and how often these have been cited play a role in academic promotion. Bibliometrics that attempt to quantify the relative impact of scholarly work have been proposed. The h-index is defined as the number (h) of publications for an individual that have been cited at least h times. We calculated the h-index and number of publications for academic emergency physicians at the rank of professor.

Methods: We accessed the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine professor list in January of 2012. We calculated the number of publications through Web of Science and PubMed and the h-index using Google scholar and Web of Science.

Results: We identified 299 professors of emergency medicine. The number of professors per institution ranged from 1 to 13. Median h-index in Web of Science was 11 (interquartile range [IQR] 6-17, range 0-51), in Google Scholar median h-index was 14 (IQR 9-22, range 0-63) The median number of publications reported in Web of Science was 36 (IQR 18-73, range 0-359. Total number of publications had a high correlation with the h-index (r=0.884).

Conclusion: The h-index is only a partial measure of academic productivity. As a measure of the impact of an individual's publications it can provide a simple way to compare and measure academic progress and provide a metric that can be used when evaluating a person for academic promotion. Calculation of the h-index can provide a way to track academic progress and impact. [West J Emerg Med. 2014;15(3):290-292.].

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: By the WestJEM article submission agreement, all authors are required to disclose all affiliations, funding sources and financial or management relationships that could be perceived as potential sources of bias. The authors disclosed none.

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