An accurate and fair assessment of the efficiency and impact of scientific work is, despite a lot of recent research effort, still an open problem. The measurement of quality and success of individual scientists and research groups can be approached from many different directions, none of which is universal. A reason for this is inherently different behavior of different scientists within the global research community. A complex evaluation of ones publication activities requires a careful consideration of a wide variety of factors. The well-known H-index is one of the most used bibliometric indices. Despite its many imperfections, its simplicity and ease of interpretation make it a popular scientometric method. This short paper uses the ideas behind the H-index to analyze communities of authors who cite publishing scientists. A new author evaluation measure named aH-index is proposed, and intuitive interpretations of its properties and semantics are presented. Preliminary experiments with authors with high H-index active in the area of computer science are presented to demonstrate the properties of the proposed measure.
Analysis of the relation between the and the behavior of citing authors (citers) is also suitable for a better understanding how a community of citing authors influences . Brooks study complex citer motivations in @cite_9 . Seven citer motives are analyzed, and more than 70
@cite_9
2169882007
There were 20 scholars interviewed about their citation motives in recently published articles. Their 437 citations were scaled along 1 or more of the following 7 citer motives: currency, negative credit, operational information, persuasiveness, positive credit, reader alert, and social consensus. The majority (70.7 ) of the references were attributed to more than 1 motive. Analysis of the clustering of the citer motives showed 3 groupings: (1) persuasiveness, positive credit, currency, and social consensus, (2) negative credit, and (3) reader alert and operational information. Negative credit references were often found to be used with a countervailing positive credit, currency, or social consensus reference. This is considered to be empirical evidence of MacRoberts and MacRoberts' [8] hypothesis that scholars dissemble when giving negative references.  1986 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.