How to Successfully Boost Your H-Index? 20 Powerful Ways to Increase Your H-Index Quickly and for Free: Advice by Scientific Experts
- May 18, 2023
- Posted by: Yury Subachev, PhD
- Categories: For young scientists, Promotion, Useful skills
Recently we have analyzed in detail what the H-index is and how to determine H-index for all 3 bases of scientific citation. Since in recent years, it is the Hirsch index that has been increasingly used to assess the effectiveness of the scientific activities of employees and teachers, one need to know all the ways to increase it in order to influence this indicator.
A person with higher level of h-index has greater scientific recognition, more popular results of his/her study, higher likelihood of receiving new grants and inclusion in large joint scientific projects, and, ultimately, better conditions for funding scientific activities.
This article details all 20 ways to increase the Hirsch index. The conclusion describes the “gray” ways to cheat the h-index, offered on the Internet by various intermediaries, which should be avoided in order not to lose your position.
The h-index is directly related to the citation of articles (see the previous article), so all advice on increasing the index implies increasing the citation of individual articles.
“Today you can take the first steps
to increase your Hirsch index,
by studying the proposed 20 ways.”
1. Firstly, we recommend that you write good, high-quality publications on relevant and interesting topics. This will attract the readership – each “casual” reader, interested in the topic, can attract several other readers by showing them your article, and one of them will quote you in their work.
The article should be written competently, in good academic language. You should not write a lot of “water”, the goals and objectives of the study should be clearly spelled out. The results should also be сlear, proven and consistent with the goals. Well-designed graphs and illustrations that clearly show your results can be firmly remembered by the reader, and will first of all pop up in memory and be associated with you – the author of the study – so that the publication can later be cited by the reader as the most familiar one.
Since acquaintance with the article begins with an abstract, then special attention should be paid to it. The abstract should be concise and clear. It should arouse interest in the reader and encourage reflection.
2. Pay attention to compiling a list of references. If possible, make a large list of references. Many researchers constantly monitor their h-index and their citation by other authors and often look at exactly who cited a work and may be interested in your article, read it and also cite you. And they will do it out of interest in your publication or out of gratitude for the citation – it doesn’t matter, the main thing is what will affect the improvement of your performance. Try to include relevant works published no later than 5-7 years.
However, do not overdo it, you do not need to add sources from other areas of science that are not related to your research topic to your list of references. Citation databases are able to recognize such “garbage” links, and this will definitely not have a positive effect on your scientometric indicators.
3. Mutual citation is also possible by prior “conspiracy” with another scientist (colleague) or team. This is often used within an organization to increase its overall citation when one research team in the organization cites publications from another research team, and vice versa. Think about what kind of familiar scientists working on similar topics might be interested in raising the h-index (and by and large, everyone is interested in this, just someone is not good at it).
However, you should not blindly quote your colleagues where it is necessary and not necessary. References to works should be appropriate and consistent with the content of the publication.
4. That “scientist” you agreed to be mentioned in articles with could be yourself! Feel free to link to your own publications! First, it will increase your own Hirsch index. The so-called “self-citation” is currently not punished in any way, and, despite the fact that databases have the ability to calculate the Hirsch index without “self-citing”, all indicators of a scientist’s publication activity take into account the “full” index without subtracting their own citations. Secondly, the reader will immediately see that you have other publications on this topic, and, perhaps, they will immediately find them and get acquainted with them (and, perhaps, also quote them!).
5. Write scientific articles in collaboration with well-known people with high scientometric indicators. For a young scientist who is just starting his scientific career, such a co-author is primarily a supervisor. The more articles you write with your supervisor, the higher your performance will be, since he also has scientific authority and a wide range of readership.
For more mature scientists, it can be advised to participate in related interesting and promising projects with researchers whose publication activity is at its peak.
6. Write review articles on specific topics. Reviews often have a wider audience than individual research articles, and also contain a large amount of different information and, therefore, are well cited in the literature.
7. Place information that can be referenced to in the future. This may be an interestingly formulated relevance of the work, an unusual application of the results of the work, etc. Don’t be afraid to write a long introduction – let there be more of this eye-catching material.
8. When publishing in a foreign language, always use the same spelling of the last name and first name (or initials). This will make it easier for other scientists to find them, as well as speed up your adding them to your profile in databases. Pay attention to how your name and surname were written in translation journals, and if this does not correspond to the option you have chosen, then be sure to send the corrected version to the editor. Otherwise, such an article, firstly, will not be correctly identified by databases and, secondly, readers will not be able to find it when searching for your last name.
9. For the same reason, people with a high Hirsch index are not recommended to change their last name. If this happens, the profiles in the databases provide for the indication of a second surname or the combination of two profiles with different surnames, however, you may lose your recognition in the scientific community.
2. How to inform the readership about your new publications?
10. Expand the audience of people who will hear or read that you have released a new article. Or, in other words, engage in self-promotion! Currently, some “advanced” authors send out emails to potential readers (for example, colleagues from another scientific institution dealing with similar topics) with the text: “You may be interested that we have published a new article on the topic” … “, with which you can check out the link…
11. Foreign publishers recommend creating an account on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, where you will post information about the publication of your new article.
12. Use other ways to expand your readership, for example, announce your publications in papers at conferences. If this is a poster report, then place a link to your article (s) in the list of references at the end of the report. If this is an oral (plenary) report, then mention that some of the results are published in [such and such] article, where they can be found in more detail. Post a link there to your Twitter or Facebook account if you decided to use the previous tip, and to your email (you can promise listeners to send the article if they email you asking for it). Do not flip through the slide, take enough time to record this information.
13. Create a personal profile in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. Attach all your articles to it, and also check from time to time that new articles are displayed under your authorship. This is important for several reasons: firstly, the h-index is usually (see the previous article) calculated for the list of articles that are related to a given scientist in the database, and secondly, it will be easier for a scientist who is interested in your subject to find all your articles. For the last reason, we recommend that you also create an ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) profile. We will tell you more about working with a personal profile in various databases in future articles.
14. Register in the ResearchGate social network of scientists – https://www.researchgate.net/. There you can publish your articles, annotations, posters and other materials. This will allow you to expand your network of scientific contacts and increase citation, because in order to access the full text of many articles, you must have subscriptions to various databases. Large institutions and universities pay employees access to such publications, but not all and not all. Often graduate students are forced to use information only from open sources. Is your article not in the public domain? “Put it up on ResearchGate so people like that can read it and maybe quote it. In the future, we will write in more detail about the capabilities of ResearchGate, how to register there and use it effectively.
3. Why publish articles in English?
15. Publish more articles in English. If you want your work to be known among foreign readers, then you need to write more in English, since the leading citation databases – Scopus and Web of Science – for the most part index English-language publications. At the same time, similar to what was already said in paragraph 1 of our list, an article in English must be written in competent English (British or American English, but not mixed in any way), have a structure and design corresponding to a particular journal.
If you are fluent in English and can write articles in English, have your text checked by a native English speaker t before submitting an article for publication in a good journal. Not only will he/she correct any errors or typos, he/she will also make the text stylistically smoother and easier to read for an English-speaking audience.
16. When citing your articles that have a translated version in English, do not forget that it is better to indicate the link to the English-language article. This, firstly, will make it much easier for the English-speaking reader to get acquainted with your work, and, secondly, the English-speaking audience is much wider, thanks to which more of your foreign colleagues will read your scientific work, which will increase the likelihood of citation.
4. What are the best journals to publish in?
17. Choose the right journal to publish. We recommend that you publish your articles in journals indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. This will increase your h-index calculated in those bases. Pay attention also to the impact factor of the journal, it reflects the average citation of articles in this journal (the higher, the better).
Another important point is also the choice of a journal that is suitable for the subject – you can publish an article in a journal with a high impact factor, but not get links to it at all, if it turns out that articles in this journal are mainly devoted to the study of other topics, and “your reader” does not watch this magazine at all. Consider before publishing which magazines your potential readership is viewing.
18. Publish in open access journals – the so-called “Open Access Journals”. Readers will not have to pay to read such articles (no database subscriptions will be needed), so publications in such journals usually get a wider readership and, therefore, citation. However, you will have to pay as usually such journals charge a fee for publication from the authors.
19. Beware of “junk” and “predatory” magazines. Such journals include periodicals that claim to be scientific journals, but in fact are such only formally, and they themselves exist by charging a certain fee from the authors of articles for the fact of publication or even for reviewing the article. At the same time, the journal does not provide full-fledged editorial or publishing services (including a full-fledged peer review system) accepted in real scientific journals. Such journals, as a rule, have a low impact factor, accept articles in almost any form without delving into the content, and even publish articles with spelling and grammatical errors. At any time, the journal can be excluded from the citation database after being checked by experts and you will be left without a Scopus publication.
Before submitting an article for consideration to the editors of any journal, carefully study the information about it. First, check if the journal is included in the required database (Scopus, Web of Science), but you need to do this not on the journal’s website itself (the journal’s employees can post false information there), but on the official website of the citation database itself. Also check if there are any negative reviews about this magazine on the Internet.
5. Another way for the most desperate.
20. Another interesting method (which we do not recommend to use, but which is worth mentioning) is writing a very controversial (or even erroneous) article. If it is published, then you can get a lot of citations from those people who will argue with your judgments in their publications, but perhaps this will be your last article – in the future you risk being refused publication by publishers and reviewers.
6. Shady ways to cheat the Hirsch index.
It is worth noting that the methods below carry a high reputational risk for a scientist, such methods should never be used, but you should be aware of them in order to recognize them in time, since recently there are a lot of unscrupulous companies on the Internet that offer this method increase the Hirsch index.
The schemes themselves are very simple and are based only on the fact that for a certain fee you will formally increase the h-index, but there are no guarantees that the publication will not be excluded from the citation bases due to its fraudulent schemes, and you will not lose your scientific position after as it becomes known to your management.
If you are offered any of the following as assistance on a reimbursable basis, then you should be aware of:
– placement of links in journals that are irrelevant to your subject area;
– placing links in articles with a little-known author or even participating in such articles as a co-author;
– publication in the collections of correspondence conferences.
Do not fall for the scammers. Remember that it is better to use laborious but honest ways to increase the Hirsch index than to be in an unpleasant situation of exposing among your colleagues.
Conclusion
If you have read to the end, now you know all the ways to increase the Hirsch index and become more recognizable in scientific circles. Choose a few ways and start applying them today. Register in scientometric databases, check your performance and work on improving it. Register on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn right now and place a link to these profiles in your email template at the end of the letter so that anyone can get acquainted with your scientific interests and publications.
