Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to discuss the results of recent experiments in determining the h-index at the country level for the 10 Ibero-American countries of South America. Design/methodology/approach -The three citation index components (Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index) of the Web of Science system of Thomson-Reuters and the Scopus database of Elsevier are used to gauge the comparability of the h-indexes reported by the two systems. Findings -The results show that in spite of the significant differences in the content of the two databases in terms of their source base and the extent of cited reference enhancement of records, the rank correlation of the ten countries based on the h-index values returned by Web of Science and Scopus is very high. Originality/value -For this sample, in spite of differences between WoS and Scopus in the number of papers from each country, the rank position of the countries by the h-index is almost the same. There is only a single rank position difference -Scopus rank Argentina second and Chile third, while the order is the reverse in WoS. This reconfirms the robustness of the h-index at the country level. Keywords Publishing, Databases, South America Originally, the concept of the h-index was developed to measure the scholarly publishing productivity and impact of individual researchers through a single indicator. It became widely popular for the simplicity of the concept, and its use was extended to research groups, institutions and journals. This paper discusses the results of my recent experiments in determining the h-index at the country level for the ten Ibero-American countries of South America. The three citation index components (Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index) of the Web of Science system of Thomson-Reuters and the Scopus database of Elsevier were used to gauge the comparability of the h-indexes reported by the two systems. The experiments covered the 1981 to 2007 publication years as the time period. The citation window was extended to mid-January 2009. The results show that in spite of the significant differences in the content of the two databases in terms of their source base and the extent of cited reference enhancement of records, the rank correlation of the ten countries based on the h-index values returned by Web of Science and Scopus was very high. Introduction The h-index was introduced by Jorge E. Hirsch (2005) to quantify the scientific publication output and the impact of the work of researchers. It is a composite measure based on the combination of the number of papers published and the number of citations these papers have received according to records created for and reported by Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. The h-index was originally meant to measure the scientific performance of researchers through the prism of publications. It received much attention and wide acceptance from the most respected scientometricians, along with several suggestions and recommendations for derivative indexes (Bornmann and Daniel,
Jacsó and Péter REF extended the h-index at the country level to analyze the scientific capability of countries from the perspective of research productivity and impact.
The h‐index for countries in Web of Science and Scopus
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