flynn002

The H-index is a metric that was devised to identify talented individuals whose published work had made a significant impact on the field (Hirsch, 2005). One of its apparent virtues was that it was relatively difficult to game. However, analysis of publications in a group of journals in the field of developmental disabilities suggest there has been a systematic and audacious attempt at gaming the H-index by a cabal of editors. What's the evidence for this claim? Let's start by briefly explaining what the H-index is. It's computed by rank ordering a set of publications in terms of their citation count, and identifying the point where the rank order exceeds the number of citations. So if a person has an H-index of 20 this means that they've published 20 papers with at least 20 citations – but their 21st paper (if there is one) had fewer than 21 citations. The reason this is reckoned to be relatively impervious to gaming is that authors don't, in general, have much too...

Last October, I was surprised to see a tweet from @autismcrisis (Michelle Dawson) saying "Belatedly noticed: @ deevybee is on the editorial board of Johnny Matson's RASD?! Well I'm speechless. Wow." Many of those reading this tweet were puzzled as to what this was all about, but I was aware that Michelle had earlier drawn attention to an odd feature of the journal Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders (RASD): an unusually high proportion of the papers in the journal were authored by the Editor, Johnny Matson*. People were even more puzzled by my reaction, which was to express surprise and to thank Michelle for telling me. Surely, you might think, you'd know if you were on the Editorial Board of a journal. But, actually, that's not always the case. I had no recollection of having joined the Editorial Board, but my memory for the past is not good. I did remember having some correspondence with Johnny Matson around 2008, about a nice article he'd written con...