Dear Sir,

Today, the h-index is a widely accepted indicator of sci-entific performance and has become a built-in feature of bibliographic databases such as theWebofScience (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier) (van Eck &Waltman, 2008). The wide acceptance is due mainly to the many advantages of the new index. These include its simplicity and intuitive meaning (Franceschini & Maisano, 2010), the combination of citation impact and publication numbers in one number (British Academy, 2007), and its robustness against small errors and single peaks (top-cited papers) in a publication list (Liu & Rousseau, 2009). In a recent issue of Physics Today, Gott (2010) criticized the h-index for measuring a scientist’s output: It does not pro-portionally reward individuals for theirmost important papers and unfairly favors scientists in large collaborations. Bot