The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Does the h index have predictive power?
Open accessAbstract
Bibliometric measures of individual scientific achievement are of particular interest if they can be used to predict future achievement. Here we report results of an empirical study of the predictive power of the h index compared with other indicators. Our findings indicate that the h index is better than other indicators considered (total citation count, citations per paper, and total paper count) in predicting future scientific achievement. We discuss reasons for the superiority of the h index.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Fortunato, S., Bergstrom, C. T., Börner, K., Evans, J. A., Helbing, D., Milojević, S., Petersen, A. M., Radicchi, F., Sinatra, R., Uzzi, B., et al. (2018) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aao0185 · Cited by 1,497
“It has been suggested that the future h-index (83) of a scientist can be accurately predicted (84), although the predictive power is reduced when”
A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics
Mingers, J., & Leydesdorff, L. (2015) · European Journal of Operational Research · doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2015.04.002 · Cited by 1,002
Universality of citation distributions: Toward an objective measure of scientific impact
Radicchi, F., Fortunato, S., & Castellano, C. (2008) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0806977105 · Cited by 828
Over-optimization of academic publishing metrics: observing Goodhart's Law in action
Fire, M., & Guestrin, C. (2019) · GigaScience · doi:10.1093/gigascience/giz053 · Cited by 351
Acuna, D. E., Allesina, S., & Kording, K. P. (2012) · Nature · doi:10.1038/489201a · Cited by 249
Metadata
- Authors
- Hirsch, J. E.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2007-12-04
- Volume
- 104
- Issue
- 49
- Pages
- 19193-19198
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W1982218215
- Cited by
- 973
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 49.40
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Does the h index have predictive power? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.0707962104
- The paper
- Hirsch, J. E. (2007). Does the h index have predictive power? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0707962104
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.