Ann. Phys. (Berlin) 523, No. 1 – 2, 179 – 190 (2011) / DOI 10.1002/andp.201000090 The scientiﬁc road of Manuel Cardona: a bibliometric analysis A. H. Romero 1, * , R. K. Kremer 2 , and W. Marx 2 1 Materials Department, CINVESTAV Unidad Queretaro, QRO CP 76230, Mexico 2 Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Heisenbergstraße 1, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany Received 21 July 2010, revised 25 August 2010, accepted 22 September 2010 Published online 2 November 2010 Key words Hirsch index, h index, Manuel Cardona, scientiﬁc impact. This article is dedicated to Manuel Cardona. We present a detailed bibliometric analysis of the scientiﬁc contributions of Manuel Cardona, who rep- resents an interesting example of a renowned scientist with a long and fruitful career. His publications provide an appropriate basis to apply various bibliometric techniques to measure the impact of his scientiﬁc achievements. For this purpose, we have taken into account his full publication record, the institutions of all his coauthors, the journals where his papers have been published, and the citations of his papers as a measure of their impact. We have analyzed in more detail some of his most important publications, which appeared as journal papers and book contributions. Additionally, we have broken down the complete en- semble of the citing papers with respect to the countries of authors, the journals, and the subject areas. The analysis performed in this study also makes use of the Hirsch index as one of the most recognized biblio- metric indicators which has rapidly captured the ﬁeld of research evaluation. Finally, we have established the citation historiogram based on the most highly-cited papers to visualize their citation network. c  2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim Introduction The application of bibliometric techniques to evaluate the impact of a given scientist, a research group, a department or a research ﬁeld has become increasingly important for funding agencies, awarding com- mittees, elections to learned societies, hiring committees, etc. In particular, the introduction of the Hirsch index (h-index) [1] (an indicator that measures scientiﬁc output in terms of papers and their impact in terms of citations in one single number), and the m-index [1] (the same index but normalized with respect to the scientiﬁc age of a given scientist) has stimulated the idea of using bibliometric techniques to describe scientiﬁc performance. Meanwhile, these indexes and other bibliometric indicators have been applied in a wide diversity of variants and to different evaluation requirements [4–15]. In this paper, we discuss the application of bibliometry to a renowned scientist with a world wide recognized scientiﬁc lifework. Manuel Cardona is among the most proliﬁc physicists of the last century. He has been active in different areas within solid state physics and has published an impressive number of publications (currently more than 1200 papers, published in a large number of journals, covered by the Thomson Reuters citation in- dexes). His publications have received a large number of citations that clearly reﬂect the scientiﬁc impact of his work. Herewith we recognize his contribution by performing a bibliometric analysis of his scientiﬁc oeuvre and employ standard methods for research evaluation in order to follow the trails of his work. We start our paper with a brief discussion of the methodology and continue by analyzing Manuel Cardona’s impact as revealed by bibliometric tools. ∗ Corresponding author E-mail: aromero@qro.cinvestav.mx c  2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim