Darwin's h-index

  I guess most scientists are nowadays familiar with the term "h-index", which is a metric of citations to your published articles. More specifically the h-index correspond to the number of articles (h) that have at least h citations. Given that this index is used by many funding agencies and by peers that evaluate you for a position or competitive grant, we all hope to see it grow year by year.

  Charles Darwin lived in completely different times, he had no need to apply for grants or positions every few years and there was no system to track citations or give a "number" to the supposed "impact" of his research.  He, nevertheless, has been absorbed by the current metrics obsession and has already an h-index, computed by google scholar. 

His magic number is 63. Will this change anyway our idea of how important was Darwin's impact to Science? or it will rather help us to put the h-index into context, and highlight the difficulty of measuring true impacts?

Map of scientific collaborations

My brother pointed to me this map of scientific collaboration between researchers made by  Olivier H. Beauchesne. Inspired by a similar map drawn for facebook friends, O. Beauchesne used a bibliographical database to trace links between universities if their respective researchers were co-authoring articles.

The result is an amazing picture, that shows that, as for many other things, research is unevenly distributed around the world. With a clear North/South divide, research and economic centres overlap almost completely. As expected, North-america, Europe and Japan are the most densely connected areas. Emerging research countries such as India, China, and Brasil can also be recognized. Within Europe, South UK, Paris, the Netherlands, and Switzerland/Austria seem to form research hubs. Perhaps influenced by language and cultural ties, Spain and Portugal are relatively well connected to central and south-American countries.

Barcelona, where my lab is located, appears to be the most densely connected research pole in Spain.