The h-index is an author-level metric that was invented in 2005 by Jorge Eduardo Hirsch, an Argentine-American professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.
The h-index was developed by J.E. Hirsch and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (46): 16569-16572 November 15 2005. It reflects the productivity of authors based on their publication and citation records.