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What a journal's h-index means

A venue has an h-index of h when h of its papers have each been cited at least h times. A journal with an h-index of 300 has published 300 papers cited 300 times or more.

What it tells you, and what it doesn't

• It only grows, so an old, large journal has a higher h-index than a young one of the same quality.
• It depends on how much a field cites: medicine and biology cite far more than mathematics, so a top mathematics journal can have a lower h-index than a mid-ranked medical one.
• It says nothing about a single paper's chances or quality.

Compare h-indexes only within a field, and alongside a recent measure such as the two-year mean citedness. The values on our venue pages come from OpenAlex, so they differ from values computed on Scopus, Web of Science or Google Scholar.