However it is not hard to find situations in which h can not at all to describe the importance of a scientist is to point out that, in this sense, scientists who have had a short career are significantly penalized, because the h index does not take into account their influence because they have produced only a limited number of contributions, no matter how decisive. For example, the index of Evariste Galois is 2 and will remain so forever, if Albert Einstein had died at ‘the beginning of 1906, its index would have stopped at 4 or 5, a value that certainly does not represent with dignity the importance of studies that led to the publication in 1905. The validity of this objection is based on an analysis of the data reported in the same order, indicating a ranking of physicians by index: immediately apparent that, compared with physical values ​​of h greater than or close to 100, Richard Feynman h = 23, h = 19 Paul Dirac and Einstein is not even present.
The index h does not consider the context of citations. For example, some works are cited in an article simply to facilitate an introduction, even if they have low significance to the specific context, or does not have the resolving power to delimit citations made in a negative context or fraudulent.
The index h is affected by limitations in the databases of citations, especially for articles before the nineties.
The index does not take into account the h citations. If a researcher writes a lot of work accumulated in the same sector, it is likely that I will mention his previous articles, and this tends to create a long tail of citations that can artificially increase the index.
H The index does not take into account the number of authors of an article with this benefiting the authors who decide to sign with the articles. This means that even an author who has made a minimum contribution to get published, for the purpose of calculating the index, a publication and its citations account, like everyone else. This clearly benefits those who run a research group, for example, teachers with a large number of graduate students: it is normal that the professor is among the authors, as follows and advises students and reviewing the drafts of publications, he gets a number of articles to his name out of proportion to the actual work.
The index h seems to emphasize the work from large well-funded collaborations, present in all meetings and industry conferences, rather than small research groups or individuals who spend much of their professional time working in order to obtain scientific results rather to take care of their social connections.