Exploring the h-index at the author and journal levels using bibliometric data of productive consumer scholars and business-related journals respectively

SummaryUsing both author-level and journal-level data, Hirsch's h-index is shown to possess substantial heuristic value in that it yields accurate results whilst requiring minimal informational acquisition effort. As expected, the h-index of productive consumer scholars correlated strongly with their total citation counts. Furthermore, the h-indices as obtained via ISI/Thompson and GoogleScholar were highly correlated albeit the latter yielded higher values. Finally, using a database of business-relevant journals, a significant correlation was found between the journals' h-indices and their citation impact scores.