Reflections around ‘the cautionary use’ of the h-index: response to Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki

In a recent Letter to the Editor Teixeira da Silva and Dobránszki (2018) present a discussion of the issues regarding the h-index as an indicator for the evaluation of individual scholars, particularly in the current landscape of the proliferation of online sources that provide individual level bibliometric indicators. From our point of view, the issues surrounding the h-index go far beyond the problems mentioned by TSD. In this letter we provide some overview of this, mostly by expanding TSD’s original argument and discussing more conceptual and global issues related to the indicator, particularly in the outlook of a strong proliferation of online sources providing individual researcher indicators. Our discussion focuses on the h-index and the profusion of sources providing it, but we emphasize that many of our points are of a more general nature, and would be equally relevant for other indicators that reach the same level of popularity as the h-index.