H-index Examples

Here is a simple example of an h index:

The work Elements of Chemistry by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier is tagged in LibraryThing. If you list his tags from most frequent to least frequent you get:

1. Science (8)
2. Chemistry (4)
3. Nonfiction (4)
4. Great books (2)
5. Attic-V (1)
6. Britannica Great Books (1)
7. Chemical Analysis (1)

By the definition, this tag cloud has an h index of 3 because only 3 tags have been repeated at least three times: science, chemistry, and nonfiction.



Two works with the same h index scores are comparable in terms of their tag clouds overall descriptive impact, even if the total number of unique or repeated tags is very different.




For two works with the similar number of unique tags, the work with the higher h index has a tag cloud that is more fully descriptive.

Here we ask the old cataloger question, “Would a searcher who typed in “people, portfolio, fotos” be happy with the result of David Shirgley’s URL?” What about a user who searched for “design, plugins, collaboration”, would they be interested in structured blogging? We think the answer is more likely yes in the latter case.

To get a sense of what is a common h index, we took random samples of 100 works from both del.icio.us and library thing and calculated the h index for their tag clouds. In both cases, we found most of the h indexes fell within the 3-7 range. More testing is needed to see if this pattern holds.