The Limits of Citation Counts
Digital Libraries
2023-09-20 v3 Social and Information Networks
Theoretical Economics
Physics and Society
Abstract
I study the measurement of scientists' influence using bibliographic data. The main result is an axiomatic characterization of the family of citation-counting indices, a broad class of influence measures which includes the renowned h-index. The result highlights several limitations of these indices: they are not suitable to compare scientists across different fields, and they cannot account for indirect influence. I explore how these limitations can be overcome by using richer bibliographic information.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1711.02695,
title = {The Limits of Citation Counts},
author = {Antonin Macé},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.02695},
year = {2023}
}