Survey of Publications and the H-index in Academic Emergency Medicine Professors

• Main Authors: Matthew Babineau, Christopher Fischer, Kathryn Volz, Leon D. Sanchez
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: eScholarship Publishing, University of California 2014-05-01
• Series: Western Journal of Emergency Medicine
• Subjects: emergency department; medicine
• Online Access: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2t3706bz

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.