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.