The Hirsch spectrum: a novel tool for analysing scientific journals

This paper introduces the Hirsch spectrum (h-spectrum) for analyzing the academic reputation of a scientific journal. h-Spectrum is a novel tool based on the Hirsch (h) index. It is easy to construct: considering a specific journal in a specific interval of time, h-spectrum is defined as the distribution representing the h-indexes associated to the authors of the journal articles. This tool allows defining a reference profile of the typical author of a journal, compare different journals within the same scientific field, and provide a rough indication of prestige/reputation of a journal in the scientific community. h-Spectrum can be associated to every journal. Ten specific journals in the Quality Engineering/Quality Management field are analyzed so as to preliminarily investigate the h-spectrum characteristics.