hg-Index (Composite Hirsch-Egghe)
The hg-index, proposed by Alonso, Cabrerizo, Herrera-Viedma, and Herrera in 2010, fuses the two best-known author metrics into a single composite. The h-index is robust but ignores how heavily an author's top papers are cited, while Egghe's g-index rewards those highly cited papers but can be swayed by a single outlier. The hg-index takes the geometric mean of the two, producing a value that lies between them and inherits a balance of their strengths: it remains close to the stable h-index while still responding to the citation impact captured by g. The authors showed that the geometric mean stays nearer to the smaller, more conservative h-index than the larger g-index, tempering the latter's sensitivity to extreme papers.
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Sources
- Alonso, S., Cabrerizo, F. J., Herrera-Viedma, E., & Herrera, F. (2010). hg-index: a new index to characterize the scientific output of researchers based on the h- and g-indices. Scientometrics, 82(2), 391-400. DOI: 10.1007/s11192-009-0047-5 ↗
- Egghe, L. (2006). Theory and practise of the g-index. Scientometrics, 69(1), 131-152. DOI: 10.1007/s11192-006-0144-7 ↗
- Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(46), 16569-16572. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0507655102 ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). hg-Index (Alonso Geometric Mean of h and g). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/bibliometrics/hg-index
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
- Contemporary h-IndexBibliometrics↔ compare
- e-Index (Excess Citations)Bibliometrics↔ compare
- g-Index (Egghe)Bibliometrics↔ compare