How to find the h-index of a professor? I am an Computer Science undergraduate student and I am looking for my potential mentor for my PhD study. I guess besides research interest, personality etc., h-index is an important factor one should consider. So I wonder whether there is a way to find out about the precise h-index of an arbitral author.

I've been using Microsoft Academic Search. It's cool, it often finds the right person and gives you his/her h-index. However, I believe that this tool has underestimated the h-index of many researchers. (I think so because I've tried typing in some very famous professors' names and the h-index that Microsoft gives is about 10~20 lower than the actually value).

Moreover, since I am mostly interested in Human-Computer Interaction so I am also referring to ACM SIGCHI's Most Frequent Authors Page. The page is awesome: it gives you the most brilliant professors ranked by their number of publications. However, I think h-index is a better metric than the number of publications alone.

I could, of course, go to the professors' websites and read their publication list. But I want to know whether there is a better, more efficient way of finding h-index.
There is no such thing as "the precise h-index".

The h-index is defined as the largest integer h such that at least h of the author's publications have at least h citations each.  But what's a publication?  Do first-author publications carry more weight?  Do ArXiv, technical report, conference, and journal versions of the "same" paper (all of which may have citations) count as four papers or one?  Or does it depend on the difference in content between versions?  (How do you measure that difference?)  Does the quality of the venue matter?  If so, which venues count as "real" publications?  Do survey articles count?  Popular science articles?  Blog posts?  StackExchange questions?*  Do self-citations count?  If so, does a citation to a paper by X and Y, in a paper by Y and Z, count toward X's h-index?  How much (and who) are you willing to pay to make sure you've really counted every citation to every publication?

The different sources of the h-index make different well-reasoned decisions about each of these issues, none of which make sense for ALL areas, even within computer science.


  I think h-index is a better metric than the number of publications alone.


This is a pretty low standard.  You can do better.



*At least one of my StackExchange questions has more citations than at least one of my papers.