C-Index: A Novel Quantitative Measurement of Academic Achievement
This paper aims at extending h-index for evaluating the scientific achievement of individual scientists more objectively. The main idea is to replace the minimal times of cites by the average times of cites for the document set concerned. Besides, several rational principles are also proposed for consideration.
Detecting h-index manipulation through self-citation analysis
The h-index has received an enormous attention for being an indicator that measures the quality of researchers and organizations. We investigate to what degree authors can inflate their h-index through strategic self-citations with the help of a simulation. We extended Burrell’s publication model with a procedure for placing self-citations, following three different strategies: random self-citation, recent self-citations and h-manipulating self-citations. The results show that authors can considerably inflate their h-index through self-citations. We propose the q-index as an indicator for how strategically an author has placed self-citations, and which serves as a tool to detect possible manipulation of the h-index. The results also show that the best strategy for an high h-index is publishing papers that are highly cited by others. The productivity has also a positive effect on the h-index.
Hirsch's h-index: A stochastic model
We propose a simple stochastic model for an author's production/citation process in order to investigate the recently proposed h-index for measuring an author's research output and its impact. The parametric model distinguishes between an author's publication process and the subsequent citation processes of the published papers. This allows us to investigate different scenarios such as varying the production/publication rates and citation rates as well as the researcher's career length. We are able to draw tentative results regarding the dependence of Hirsch's h-index on each of these fundamental parameters. We conjecture that the h-index is, according to this model, (approximately) linear in career length, log publication rate and log citation rate, at least for moderate citation rates.