The h-index is an indicator of the scientific impact of an academic publishing career. Its hybrid publishing/citation nature and inherent bias against younger researchers, women, people in low resourced countries, and those not prioritizing publishing arguably give it little value for most formal and informal research evaluations. Nevertheless, it is well-known by academics, used in some promotion decisions, and is prominent in bibliometric databases, such as Google Scholar. In the context of this apparent conflict, it is important to understand researchers’ attitudes towards the h-index. This article used public tweets in English to analyse how scholars discuss the h-index in public: is it mentioned, are tweets about it positive or negative, and has interest decreased since its shortcomings were exposed? The January 2021 Twitter Academic Research initiative was harnessed to download all English tweets mentioning the h-index from the 2006 start of Twitter until the end of 2020. The results showed a constantly increasing number of tweets. Whilst the most popular tweets unapologetically used the h-index as an indicator of research performance, 28.5% of tweets were critical of its simplistic nature and others joked about it (8%). The results suggest that interest in the h-index is still increasing online despite scientists willing to evaluate the h-index in public tending to be critical. Nevertheless, in limited situations it may be effective at succinctly conveying the message that a researcher has had a successful publishing career.

h指数是学术出版事业的科学影响的指标。它的混合出版/引用性质以及对年轻研究人员、女性、资源匮乏国家的人们以及那些不优先考虑出版的人的固有偏见，可以说对于大多数正式和非正式的研究评估来说几乎没有价值。尽管如此，它还是为学术界所熟知，用于一些晋升决策，并且在诸如 Google Scholar 等文献计量数据库中很突出。在这种明显冲突的背景下，了解研究人员对h指数的态度很重要。本文使用英文公开推文分析学者如何讨论-index in public：有没有提到，关于它的推文是正面的还是负面的，自从它的缺点暴露出来后，兴趣下降了吗？2021 年 1 月的 Twitter 学术研究计划被用来下载从 2006 年 Twitter 开始到 2020 年底所有提到h -index 的英文推文。结果显示推文数量不断增加。虽然最受欢迎的推文毫无歉意地使用h指数作为研究绩效的指标，但 28.5% 的推文批评其过于简单化，其他推文则对此开玩笑（8%）。结果表明，尽管科学家愿意评估 h 指数，但在线上对 h 指数的兴趣仍在增加。- 公众中的指数往往是关键的。然而，在有限的情况下，它可能有效地简洁地传达研究人员拥有成功的出版事业的信息。