ABSTRACT
Is the best measure of a scientist's worth the total number of his or her published papers? For many years Institute for Scientific Information has been publishing the lists of impact factors providing quantitative tools for ranking scientists. The impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information. Impact factors are calculated each year by the Institute for Scientific Information for those journals which it indexes, and are published in Journal Citation Reports. These measures apply only to journals, not individual articles or individual scientists. For the impact factor of individual scientists, there exists the h-index or Hirsch number. The Hirsch-index (h-index) has recently been defined by Hirsch as a new method for measuring the scientific activity. If a scientist has published n articles which all have been cited at least n times, then he will have a h-index of n . The h-index seeks to describe the impact of individual researchers, rather than journals. The h-index is the result of the balance between the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. H-index: Impact of Individual Scientists. H-index or/and impact factor - it is the question of the future.
