This month, the h-index of Volodymyr Lushchak, Professor of the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology at Precarpathian National University, Honoured Worker of Science and Technology of Ukraine, reached 47 in the Scopus science-based database. This means that Professor Lushchak has at least 47 articles, each of which has been cited at least 47 times.

Citation depends on the subject matter of the research, the relevance of the results, the quality of the presentation of the results, and the readability of the publication. An article in a mid-level life sciences journal can receive from one to ten citations per year. Very often, articles get two or three dozen citations, and then are cited very slowly. “It is relatively easy to reach an h-index of about 10. After this value, the growth of this scientometric indicator slows down significantly and is determined by the publication that is the least cited. That is why the h-index of 47 in Scopus is an indicator of the high quality of a researcher.

In total, Professor Lushchak has 230 publications indexed in the Scopus database, with a total of 10196 citations.

The most cited articles are his review articles “Environmentally induced oxidative stress in aquatic animals” and “Free radicals, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress and its classification”, which have 1851 and 1021 citations, respectively.

Among the experimental articles, the most cited is the article in the American Journal of Physiology “Oxidative stress and antioxidant defences in goldfish Carassius auratus during anoxia and reoxygenation”, which has been cited 355 times in 22.5 years. Among the top 1000 most cited Ukrainians, only about 35 scientists have an h-index above 47 (https://ua.h-index.com/uk/scopus1000; data as of the beginning of the year), mostly physicists.

In some places, entire research institutes and well-known universities have an h-index below 47 (you can check the data as of the beginning of the year at this link https://ua.h– index.com/uk?sort=-scopus).

The growth of this index for our university and for Professor Volodymyr Lushchak is evidence of the right vector of development, including the continuous conduct of high-quality research and the publication of its results in the highest possible ranking.