Via Maya Sen and Twitter, I spent some time playing around with Scholarometer, a web interface to a database that allows for normalized comparisons of citation metrics (like the h-index) across different disciplines. If you're looking to kill a few minutes this weekend, you might want to go do the same.
One thing that I had suspected was that -- because of the predominance of single-authorship among lawprofs -- the normalized h-index for those tagged in "law" would be lower than in political science, and the distribution of h would be a steeper power-law-like shape than in political science or in other disciplines. And, in fact, that's exactly what we see: In law, a normalized h index score of 3 is good for about 12th place among all rated scholars, and a score of 2 is still in the top 25. In political science, by contrast, a normalized h score of 3 is only good enough for about 40th place over all, and a score of 2 doesn't even get you into the top 100.
Comments