Use of the h index in neurosurgery

OBJECT: Assessing academic productivity through simple quantification may overlook key information, and the use of statistical enumeration of academic output is growing. The h index, which incorporates both the total number of publications and the citations of those publications, has been recently proposed as an objective measure of academic productivity. The authors used several tools to calculate the h index for academic neurosurgeons to provide a basis for evaluating publishing by physicians. METHODS: The h index of randomly selected academic neurosurgeons from a sample of one-third of the academic programs in the US was calculated using data from Google Scholar and from the Scopus database. The mean h index for each academic rank was determined. The h indices were also correlated with various other factors (such as time spent practicing neurosurgery, authorship position) to identify how these factors influenced the h index. The h indices were then compared with other citation statistics to evaluate the robustness of this metric. Finally, h indices were also calculated for a sampling of physicians in other medical specialties for comparison. RESULTS: As expected, the h index increased with academic rank and there was a statistically significant difference between each rank. A weighting based on position of authorship did not affect h indices. The h index was positively correlated with time since American Board of Neurological Surgery certification, and it was also correlated with other citation metrics. A comparison among medical specialties supports the assertion that h index values may not be comparable between fields, even closely related specialties. CONCLUSIONS: The h index appears to be a robust statistic for comparing academic output of neurosurgeons. Within the field of academic neurosurgery, clear differences of h indices between academic ranks exist. On average, an increase of the h index by 5 appears to correspond to the next highest academic rank, with the exception of chairperson. The h index can be used as a tool, along with other evaluations, to evaluate an individual's productivity in the academic advancement process within the field of neurosurgery but should not be used for comparisons across medical specialties.