ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | JULY/AUGUST 2023 54 iTSSe TSS iTSSe TSS FEATURE 9 Another option is to represent the h-indexes as a function of the first year of publication. The issue here is that authors who may have limited contributions to thermal spray (i.e., very low h-indexes, and generally few years of input) will appear for each year and skew the box plots to lower values, whereas Fig. 1 regrouped these authors in a few data points around 0-2 years. As a result, it was chosen to only retain the information of authors with an h-index superior or equal to 4 (Fig. 2). This representation shows a different approach of qualifying the h-index in thermal spray, as it appears that for each “class” of authors, 50% of all contributors have an h-index below 10. The h-index threshold of 20 appears here as an outstanding h-index for all authors who started contributing between 1989 and 2012 (10 to 33 years of contribution in 2022). Contributors who started between 1983 and 1995 (over 27 years in 2022) have more homogeneous box plots than in Fig. 1, and it appears that an h-index over 30 is outstanding within the thermal spray field for these authors. Through these metrics, it is also possible to observe some of the highest contributing authors from the perspective of the h-index. Under the terms of this work only five authors had an h-index above 50: • Prof. Chang-Jiu Li (Xi’an Jiaotong University, China), FASM, TSS-HoF • Prof. Sanjay Sampath (Stony Brook University, USA), FASM, TSS-HoF • Prof. Robert P. Vassen (Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Germany), FASM, TSS-HoF distribution through their quartiles. The box itself is delimited by the lower and upper quartiles (25th and 75th quartile, respectively), while the line within the box delimits the median of the distribution. A cross marker indicates the mean of the distribution. On Excel, the whiskers are defined by 1.5 times the interquartile range (75th-25th quartile difference). Outliers are individual points that do not fit within the box plot. h-INDEX IN THE THERMAL SPRAY FIELD The h-index was first plotted as a function of the field input duration (Fig. 1). Overall, a gradually increasing trend with increasing input duration may be observed, which reflects how longer careers lead to higher h-indexes. Naturally, novel contributors to the field (0 to 2 years) show low h-indexes on average (< 3), while half the authors with 4 to 19 years of contributions have h-indexes between 3 and 10. Additionally, the observed outliers point toward contributors with high numbers of contributions and citations: it would appear that h-indexes between 10 and 20 in the early stages of a thermal spray career (3 to 14 years) denote outstanding contributors, while h-indexes above 20 denote outstanding contributors for mature careers (15 to 21 years). h-indexes above 30 are observed as being outstanding beyond 22 years. One drawback by representing the author h-indexes by field input duration is that increasing duration leads to less contributors, so the statistical representation becomes less meaningful, especially above 27 years, where less than 30 contributors are accounted for per year (only two are accounted for at 39 years). Fig. 1 — h-index as a function of the field input duration.
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