Top physicists of all time with respect to h-index

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maverick_starstrider
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Hi, I've been searching google for like an hour now and I can't seem to find a compiled lists of the top physicists of all time with respect to h-index (I'd like like top 100 but I'd settle for top 10). You'd think it'd be easy to find but I can't seem to find such a list. Does anyone know where one might be? Help is greatly appreciated.

P.S. I'd prefer this didn't turn into a discussion of the short comings of the h-index as a metric of success. I'm just looking for a list.
 
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maverick_starstrider said:
How is it possible that Dirac had an h-index of only 19?
It's one of the short comings of the h-index as a metric of success. :smile:
 


I'm more inclined to say the stats are wrong. Feynman didn't publish a lot so I get his low value but I was always under the impression that Dirac published quite a bit (and surely most of his papers were cited many, many times). I mean Dirac probably has more than 19 things NAMED AFTER HIM so surely each of those would have been in a highly cited paper.
 


Haha! Feynman = pwned by Brian Greene. Just goes to show you what really matters: publishing a lot and getting cited even more. :-p
 


Being cited in a paper doesn't mean you had anything useful to contribute..a lot of really terrible papers get high citations just because they did were the first to approach a particular problem, so all the new and better approaches end up listing this terrible approach in their previous work section.

I think a better measure of a person's influence is measured by the prevalence of their name in the archives of the world. Thus I present the G-index,

Dirac = 2,960,000
Feynman = 2,520,000
James Maxwell = 2,260,000
Brian Greene = 338,000
 


junglebeast said:
Being cited in a paper doesn't mean you had anything useful to contribute.
I found this out the hard way. I have an h-index of 93 because of all the papers citing my papers and saying "don't do it this way".
 
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