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
Last modified on September 7, 2026