UoK Finds 6th Place in Hirch Index among National Public State Universities

Dr. Hasan Ahmadizadeh, Head of the Central Library and Publications at the university, explained that according to ISC and Clarivate’s Web of Science, Iranian universities were ranked according to their Hirsch index in which, with a h-index of 122, the University of Kashan was placed 11^th among all universities of Iran and 6^th among public state universities of the nation.

In this list, University of Tehran, Tarbiat Moalem University, University of Tabriz, University of Shiraz, and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad ranked in top five.

After Jorge E. Hirsch’s publication of a paper in which he put forward the h-index as a metric for measuring and comparing the overall scientific productivity of individual scientists, it was adopted as the metric of evaluating the publications of a researcher for many committees and bodies.

Conceptually, for the h-index, by plotting the number of papers versus the number of citations a researcher or institute have received, the h-index is the number of papers at which the 45-degree line (citations=papers) intercepts the curve. That is, h equals the number of papers that have received at least h citations.

The advantage of the h-index is that it combines productivity (i.e. number of papers produced) and impact (number of citations) in a single number. So, both productivity and impact are required for a high h-index; neither a few highly cited papers nor a long list of papers with only a handful of citations will yield a high h-index.