Which fields drive the h-index

Published

October 1, 2023

Title

Which fields drive the h-index?

Authors

Paolo Giudici, Luca Boscolo

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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.