Shell Scripts

BiBTeX2HIndex

A Shell Script to Compute the H-Index From a Bibtex File
Max Mignotte
    Summary: This shell script computes the h-index of a researcher (and several other statistics) from a BiBTeX file on the basis of the publications referenced by Google Scholar


  • The index h is defined as "the number of papers with citation number higher or equal to h", and has been proposed by J.E. Hirsch to characterize the scientific output (i.e., publication activity and citation impact) of a researcher [paper] [Wikipedia]
    [Note that the number of citations referenced by Google Scholar may be lower than the actual one (Google Scolar is not perfect and does not reference all research papers ...)].
  • Some metasearch engine or cgi scripts presently give a rough estimation of this H-index. It is the case of [QuadSearch] or [ScHolar index] which are only based on the name of the author. By this fact, many biases exist (homonyms, errors from Google Scholar, bad referenced paper, old papers are not available online, but unpublished or draft papers are, etc...).
    For a better estimation, it is preferable to supervise the Google Scholar research with an update BiBTeX file as proposed by this shell script.
  • In addition to the h-index and various simple statistics (number of papers, number of citations etc.), this script estimates the g-index, a variant of the h-index proposed by L. Egghe [Wikipedia]. It aims to improve on the h-index by attempting to address its shortcomings [e.g., by giving more weight to highly-cited articles with the Egghe's definition "given a set of articles ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received on average at least g citations"].

  • Description
  •    - The string AUTHOR of the BiBTeX file should contain the initial(s) of the first name(s) followed by the last name, (e.g., 'A. Einstein' and thus do not put the initial(s) after the last name)
       - The proposed script uses the (very good) minimilistic http file retriever (called uhtget) proposed by Jens Laas (you can modify the proposed script in order to also use any other existing file grabbers that will get files from HTTP servers)

  • Download   [tar.gz]
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    Nota: this shell script is constantly under construction. If you have any comments, suggestions for it, or you want to report a bug, please fell free to send me an Email

Last update: July 2008