Analyzing research performance: proposition of a new complementary index
Abstract
A researcher collaborating with many groups will normally have more papers (and thus higher citations and -index) than a researcher spending all his/her time working alone or in a small group. While analyzing an author's research merit, it is therefore not enough to consider only the collective impact of the published papers, it is also necessary to quantify his/her share in the impact. For this quantification, here I propose the -index which is defined as an author's percentage share in the total citations that his/her papers have attracted. It is argued that this -index does not directly depend on the most of the subjective issues like an author's influence, affiliation, seniority or career break. A simple application of the Central Limit Theorem shows that, the scheme of equidistribution of credit among the coauthors of a paper will give us the most probable value of the -index (with an associated small standard deviation which decreases with increasing -index). I show that the total citations (), the -index and the -index are three independent parameters (within their bounds), and together they give a comprehensive idea of an author's overall research performance.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1507.05602,
title = {Analyzing research performance: proposition of a new complementary index},
author = {Shaon Sahoo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.05602},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
minor changes made; accepted for publication in Scientometrics; this version is essentially the same as the accepted one, visit link.springer.com for the final published article