Índice de Hirsch

This research identified the factors that support or impede the visibility of the scientific production
of twenty-eight researchers from Centre for Historical Studies at El Colegio de Mexico, members
of the National System of Researchers. This research determined the demography of the
bibliographic production of the researchers, as well as it classified the diffusion media used to
communicate the results of their research. Also, it determined if the bibliographic production is
indexed in the databases of Web of Science and Scopus and it established the rate of productivity
and visibility of these researchers. It analysed, too, the scientific production in languages, types of
documents and place of publication with the descriptive statistics, the dispersion of the journals
with the Bradford's Law, the growth of bibliographic production of books, book chapters, articles,
papers and critical review, and the visibility of researches with the Hirsch index.
The results obtained in this thesis were based on 4,304 documents which include books,
book chapters, articles, reports, reviews, translations, periodicals and audiovisual of the 28
researchers in the study. The research demonstrated that the dominant language of publication is
Spanish and Mexico, as the place of publication, had the largest number of papers published. Also,
it found that the researchers prefer to disseminate the results of their research through books or
book chapters. Bradford's Law identified a group of 20 journals mainly used by researchers to
disseminate the results of their research. In relation to the growth of production it found that it
follows an exponential distribution. With regard to the visibility it was found that the value of
Hirsch Index was low in Web of Science and Scopus, but high in Publish or Perish, and Scholar
Index. These results have revealed that the visibility of the researchers is the result of several
factors that are associated with the forms of dissemination and the use of scientific information in
social sciences and humanities disciplines.