Response to Sasso L (2011) Commentary on Thompson DR & Watson R (2010) Guest editorial : h-indexes and the performance of nursing professors of nursing in the UK. Journal of Clinical Nursing 19, 2957-2958. Journal of Clinical Nursing 20, 2685-2686

We are very grateful to Sasso (2011) for her commentary on our original piece on h-indexes (Thompson & Watson 2010) and to see that this is an issue that is having an impact outside the UK – albeit that the impact on Italian nursing may be negative. Clearly, we are advocates for the use of the h-index to measure individual academic performance. It is not perfect – no citation based measures are – but it is less easy to manipulate than total citations and provides a number that assesses contribution to a field, through readership and citation of a person’s work, over a relatively long period. Our purpose in writing about this in the first place and subsequently (Hunt et al. 2011) has been to try to develop some norms for our subject and also to begin to make international comparisons. As both our papers show, h-indexes of greater than 10 are very rare among nursing academics – even long-established nursing professors – with only a handful exceeding 20.