Ruscio and colleagues (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) have done a great service by systematically comparing indices of scholarly impact. Three aspects of their work are particularly valuable: (1) Their assessment of the proliferating collection of metrics, whose development has become something of a cottage industry,…

In their article Ruscio et al. (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) present a comparative study of some of the different variants of the "h" index. The study evaluates a total of 22 metrics, including the "h" index and "h"-type indices, as well as other conventional measures. The novelty of their work is to a large extent…

Ruscio and colleagues (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) provide a thoughtful empirical analysis of 22 different measures of individual scholarly impact. The simplest metric is number of publications, which Simonton (1997) found to be a reasonable predictor of career trajectories. Although the assessment of the scholarly…