An academic analysis of the h -index: An examination of its function in scholarly productivity assessment

The h -index has gained popularity as one of the most widely used bibliometric measures of academic productivity and impact, influencing decisions on hiring, promotion, funding allocation and university rankings. However, its methodological simplicity obscures substantial limitations. The index favours long academic careers, overlooks disciplinary differences in citation practices, fails to reflect research quality and originality and assigns equal credit to all co-authors regardless of contribution. Database discrepancies and the inability to distinguish positive from negative citations further reduce its reliability, potentially leading to unfair evaluations of early-career and interdisciplinary researchers. This study provides a comprehensive multi-level analysis of the h -index across disciplines and career stages. Rather than relying on large-scale statistical datasets, it synthesises the available literature and uses illustrative cases from Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, social sciences and humanities to demonstrate how database choice, disciplinary citation norms, authorship practices and academic age influence h -index scores. The analysis is complemented by alternative and supporting indicators, including the m -index, g -index and e -index, field-weighted citation impact, altmetrics, narrative curriculum vitae (CVs) and peer assessment. The findings indicate that overreliance on the h -index promotes a longevity-driven and conservative evaluation culture that may disadvantage emerging researchers and undervalue innovative or interdisciplinary work. Accordingly, the proposed framework combines time-normalised and field-adjusted metrics with transparent authorship assessment and qualitative peer review. No single indicator can adequately represent research excellence across disciplines, career stages and diverse forms of scholarly contribution. This approach aims to support fairer, more accountable and future-oriented research evaluation while promoting innovation, equity, academic motivation and responsible assessment practices.