Four reasons to stop caring so much about the h-index.

Four reasons to stop caring so much about the h-index.

Interesting blog piece from Stacy Konkiel on the h-index and altmetrics called 'Four reasons to stop caring so much about the h-index'. I like that Stacy doesn't ask us to stop caring all together about the h-index but to just stop caring 'so much' about it.

It seems confusing to me to be comparing h-index directly with Altmetrics. To me they appear to be two different things. H-index attempts to measure the productivity of a person whereas Altmetric attempts to measure the influence of an article. Why not compare the Altmetric to Relative Citation Impact (RCI) for example? The RCI is normalized for the discipline and year the article was published and gives a measure of whether the article has been cited above or below the expected average rate for the discipline. It is not immediately clear how to determine whether an Altmetrics score is relatively high or low for the discipline so it would be useful if it incorporated some sort of benchmark.