Are there better metrics for academics than the h-index?

Physics Today : Last night, there was a celebration at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, called Big Bang 2.0 in Switzerland . The event, which had several hundred attendees, was to honor the startup of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).After a series of brief talks on the project, a member of the audience asked how could junior members of collaborations get any credit for what they have accomplished, particularly when there could be more that 1000 co-authors on an LHC paper? Felicitas Pauss , the coordinator for external relations at CERN, and Ian Shipsey at Purdue University, said that the leaders of the collaboration knew who did what and how well, and are able to give appropriate credit in letters of recommendation.A counter viewpoint appeared in this week’s Nature, in which Julia Lane argues that to capture the essence of good science, academics, universities, industry, and governments must combine forces to create an open, sound and consistent system for measuring all the activities that make up academic productivity.Outside of the informal assessments mentioned by Pauss and Shipsey, some more scientific methods are used to assess the quality of scientists for tenure or employment—the most famous of which is the h-index . This index was originally developed by Jorge E. Hirsch , a physicist at the University of California, San Diego.The h-index is based on the set of the scientist’s most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other people’s publications. When hiring a scientist, some institutions will look at the average h-index for scientists of the same age and, if the scientist being considered has a higher-than-average h number, offer tenure-track position on the basis of it.However, the h-index has known flaws in assessing academics both in physics and in other fields, which amplifies calls by Lane and others to expand the metrics to include the full range of work done by scientists—including teaching ability and outreach to the public, which are usually only included as supplementary material.Do you agree?