REVIEW Psychiatry and the Hirsch h-index: The Relationship Between Journal Impact Factors and Accrued Citations Glenn E. Hunt, PhD, Michelle Cleary, RN, PhD, and Garry Walter, MD, PhD There is considerable debate on the use and abuse of journal impact factors and on selecting the most appropriate indicator to assess research outcome for an individual or group of scientists. Internet searches using Web of Science and Scopus were conducted to retrieve citation data for an individual in order to calculate nine variants of Hirsch’s h-index. Citations to articles published in a wide range of psychiatric journals in the periods 1995–99 and 2000–05 were analyzed using Web of Science. Comparisons were made between journal impact factor, h-index of citations from publication to 2008, and the proportion of articles cited at least 30 or 50 times. For up to 14 years post-publication, there was a strong positive relationship between journal impact factor and h-index for citations received. Journal impact factor was also compared to the percentage of articles cited at least 30 or 50 times—a comparison that showed wide variations between journals with similar impact factors. This study found that 40%–50% of the articles published in the top ten psychiatry journals ranked by impact factor acquire 30 to 50 citations within ten to fifteen years. Despite certain flaws and weaknesses, the h-index provides a better way to assess long-term performance of articles or authors than using a journal’s impact factor, and it provides an alternative way to assess a journal’s long-term ranking. (HARV REV PSYCHIATRY 2010;18:207–219.) Keywords: citations, h-index, journal impact factor, psychiatry journals From the Discipline of Psychiatry, University of Sydney (Drs. Hunt and Walter); Research Unit, Sydney South West Area Mental Health Service, Concord Hospital, Concord (Dr. Hunt); School of Nurs- ing & Midwifery, University of Western Sydney (Dr. Cleary); Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, Northern Sydney Cen- tral Coast Health (Dr. Walter) (all locations in New South Wales, Australia). Original manuscript received 4 August 2009; revised manuscript re- ceived 23 October 2009, accepted for publication 23 November 2009. Correspondence: Glenn E. Hunt, PhD, Research Unit, Sydney South West Area Mental Health Service, Concord Hospital, Hospital Rd., Concord, NSW 2139, Australia. Email: Glenn.hunt@sydney.edu.au  c 2010 President and Fellows of Harvard College DOI: 10.3109/10673229.2010.493742 INTRODUCTION In academic circles, the mantra “publish or perish” has been replaced by the phrase “be cited or perish.” 1,2 Citation anal- ysis began with the establishment of the Science Citation Index and the popular weekly Current Contents. 3 Before electronic publishing, if one wanted to find out what each scientist had published and who was citing whom, a visit to the library was necessary to examine the printed version of the Science Citation Index. Over the last few decades, there has been an upsurge in the use of information technology to download articles and track citations using databases like the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar to compare citation data for individuals, groups of scientists, institutions, and even countries. 4−6 These developments have had a major impact on the way scientists perform literature searches, decide 207