h-Index Manipulation by Undoing Merges
Digital Libraries
2021-01-14 v3 Discrete Mathematics
Data Structures and Algorithms
Social and Information Networks
Abstract
The h-index is an important bibliographic measure used to assess the performance of researchers. Dutiful researchers merge different versions of their articles in their Google Scholar profile even though this can decrease their h-index. In this article, we study the manipulation of the h-index by undoing such merges. In contrast to manipulation by merging articles (van Bevern et al. [Artif. Intel. 240:19-35, 2016]) such manipulation is harder to detect. We present numerous results on computational complexity (from linear-time algorithms to parameterized computational hardness results) and empirically indicate that at least small improvements of the h-index by splitting merged articles are unfortunately easily achievable.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1604.04827,
title = {h-Index Manipulation by Undoing Merges},
author = {René van Bevern and Christian Komusiewicz and Hendrik Molter and Rolf Niedermeier and Manuel Sorge and Toby Walsh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1604.04827},
year = {2021}
}