I’ve been checking on the breadth of some personal research on systems thinkers. (The list is incomplete, and may orient more towards systems scientists). Searching on Scopus gives an h-Index that counts scholarly references (with a boost, for the first person on the list who received a Nobel prize in chemistry).
The list below is sorted first on h-index, and then the number of citations.
For me, there were a few surprises. Others may be less surprised.
| Author | Documents | Citations | h-index |
| Prigogine, Ilya R. | 237 | 9,629 | 50 |
| Holling, Crawford S. | 66 | 27,402 | 38 |
| Midgley, Gerald | 83 | 2,948 | 33 |
| Checkland, Peter B. | 47 | 3,425 | 27 |
| Jackson, Michael C. | 76 | 2,716 | 26 |
| Odum, Howard T. | 55 | 4,579 | 24 |
| Ackoff, Russell L. | 68 | 2,411 | 23 |
| Wiener, Norbert | 72 | 3,758 | 22 |
| Rosen, Robert | 93 | 1,624 | 21 |
| Senge, Peter M. | 34 | 2,186 | 18 |
| Lewin, Kurt | 39 | 9,566 | 17 |
| Boulding, Kenneth E. | 79 | 2,074 | 16 |
| Trist, Eric L. | 21 | 4,537 | 15 |
| Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas | 27 | 1,013 | 15 |
| von Bertalanffy, Ludwig | 35 | 3,285 | 14 |
| Bateson, Gregory | 22 | 962 | 12 |
| Miller, James Grier | 20 | 562 | 11 |
| Meadows, Donella H. | 14 | 684 | 8 |
| Beer, Stafford | 29 | 250 | 8 |
| Emery, Frederick E. | 20 | 2,011 | 7 |
| Ashby, W. Ross | 15 | 671 | 6 |
| Churchman, C. West | 23 | 104 | 5 |
The h-index is supposed to be better in comparing researchers in the same field. Citations may or may not be better in the systems sciences, where we have a chemist alongside some economists.
Jorge Hirsch proposed the h-index as an objective measure of scientific achievement in 2005 in theoretical physics. Its use has now spread out from that.
Hirsch points out that the metric doesn’t pick up on research that deviates from mainstream, something that he has observed in his own work on superconductivity.
“If you write a paper that that’s not generally accepted, it’s an uphill battle to get people to consider it,” says Hirsch. “But just because something is accepted, it doesn’t mean that it’s right.”
Source: Conroy, Gemma. 2020. “What’s Wrong with the h-Index, According to Its Inventor.” Nature Index, March 24, 2020. https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/whats-wrong-with-the-h-index-according-to-its-inventor.
