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LeetCode 275, Medium. Topics: Array, Binary Search. View on LeetCode. Generate this problem as a practice environment: tested reference solution, 20 parametrized pytest cases, and a playground notebook:

Problem

Given an array of integers citations where citations[i] is the number of citations a researcher received for their i<sup>th</sup> paper and citations is sorted in non-descending order, return the researcher’s h-index. According to the definition of h-index on Wikipedia: The h-index is defined as the maximum value of h such that the given researcher has published at least h papers that have each been cited at least h times. You must write an algorithm that runs in logarithmic time.

Examples

Explanation: [0,1,3,5,6] means the researcher has 5 papers in total and each of them had received 0, 1, 3, 5, 6 citations respectively. Since the researcher has 3 papers with at least 3 citations each and the remaining two with no more than 3 citations each, their h-index is 3.

Constraints

  • n == citations.length
  • 1 <= n <= 10^5
  • 0 <= citations[i] <= 1000
  • citations is sorted in ascending order.

Solution

Reference implementation from solution.py on GitHub, full suite in test_solution.py:

Complexity

Tags

Last modified on September 7, 2026