Re: Perhaps we should make a useful exercise for iMechanicians

Zhigang Suo — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:02:20 -0400

Dear Mike: Thank you for the remarks. My responses:

As you pointed out: the definition of the established mechanician is arbitrary. In my post I have left the phrase undefined, and simply used the phrase to contrast with junior mechanicians.
According to the Web of Science, the most cited paper of John Hutchinson is his jmps paper on the crack-tip field in a power-law material. Here is his ResearcherID. To see the most cited papers, you need to sort by the times cited.
Each iMechanica user can include her own ResearcherID in her user profile. For example, see the profile of Michelle Oyen.
Thank you for mentioning me in the same sentence as Jim Rice and John Hutchinson. They are giants with big shoes. For anyone to have shoes to fit at all, she has to find her own shoes. I'm still trying to find mine.
Comparing your search results and the ResearcherID of Jonh Hutchinson, I noticed that Google scholar gives very different results from the Web of Science. In the latter, John's h-index is 68.
Like many people, I'm still not sure how to think about h-index. In preparing appointment cases, we are asked to provide citation metrics, and compare them with those of peers of the candidates. When a candidate has a high h-index, I would refrain from making any comment. When a candiate has a low h-index, I would be compelled to explain.
In an effort to understand h-index, I tried to calibrate the h-index against something familiar. I found h-indices for recent Timoshenko medalists. The effort seems to show that winning the Timoshenko medal is un-correlated with the h-index. I have more faith in the quality of our medalists than in the h-index.

iMechanica - h index - Comments

Re: Perhaps we should make a useful exercise for iMechanicians