Curry School: Promotion and Tenure Resources

The h-index was proposed by Jorge Hirsch in 2005 as an alternative to the impact factor. The h-index quantifies scientific productivity and the impact of a scientist based on the set of his/her most quoted papers and the number of citations that he/she has received in other people's publications. For example, an author or journal with an h-index of 30 has written at least 30 papers that have each had at least 30 citations. Thus, a higher h-index indicates more publications that have been cited more often. This metric is useful because it takes into account the uneven weight of highly cited papers or papers that have not yet been cited.

Are you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Do you need to prepare for your performance appraisal? Publish or Perish is designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage, even if you have very few citations. You can also use it to decide which journals to submit to, to prepare for a job interview, to do a literature review, to do bibliometric research, to write laudatios or obituaries, or to do some homework before meeting your academic hero. Publish or Perish is a real Swiss army knife.