# Michael S. Rosenberg’s Laboratory

Computational Evolutionary Biology & Bioinformatics

E-mail: msr@asu.edu
← Back to introduction

## career years h-index by publications

The career years h-index by publications (Mahbuba and Rousseau 2013) is a measure of publication intensity or distribution, rather than citation intensity as captured by most h-type indices. Rather than create a list of publications ranked by citation count, one creates a list of years ranked by publication count. This list is then processed in the same manner as a typical h-type index, namely the career years h-index by publications is the largest value h for which at least h years have h publications.

$$\text{career years }h\text{ by publications}=\underset{i}{\max}\left(i\leq P_i\right).$$

This metric helps indicate whether the publication output of a researcher is confined to a limited number of years (smaller value) or is spread more evenly across their career (larger values); it is most useful for comparing among established/older researchers with similar publication counts and career lengths; this metric is limiting for young researchers with short careers because the maximum value is the length of the career.

### Example

Years are ordered by number of publications, from highest to lowest.

 Year (yi) Publications (Pi) Rank (i) 2000 1997 2001 1999 1998 5 5 4 1 1 1 2 3 4 5 h = 3

The largest rank where i ≤ Pi is 3.

### History

Yearcareer years h by pubs
19971
19981
19991
20002
20013
20024
20034
20044
20054
20064
20074
20084
20094
20104
20114
20124
20135
20145
20155
20165
20175

## References

• Mahbuba, D., and R. Rousseau (2013) Year-based h-type indicators. Scientometrics 96(3):785–797.