Are there better indices for evaluation purposes than the h index? A comparison of nine different variants of the h index using data from biomedicine

Abstract

In this study, we examined empirical results on the h index and its most important variants in order to determine whether the variants developed are associated with an incremental contribution for evaluation purposes. The results of a factor analysis using bibliographic data on postdoctoral researchers in biomedicine indicate that regarding the h index and its variants, we are dealing with two types of indices that load on one factor each. One type describes the most productive core of a scientist's output and gives the number of papers in that core. The other type of indices describes the impact of the papers in the core. Because an index for evaluative purposes is a useful yardstick for comparison among scientists if the index corresponds strongly with peer assessments, we calculated a logistic regression analysis with the two factors resulting from the factor analysis as independent variables and peer assessment of the postdoctoral researchers as the dependent variable. The results of the regression analysis show that peer assessments can be predicted better using the factor 'impact of the productive core' than using the factor 'quantity of the productive core.'

Profile and scientific production of the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) researchers in the field of Hematology/Oncology

“…The performance indicators of the researchers were also included in the analysis, such as the number of citations, the H-index and the M-index. [14][15][16][17][18] Statistical analysis The development of a database and the statistical analyses were conducted using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software, version 18.0 for Windows. For the statistical analysis, regarding the grant holder categories, researchers were stratified into three groups: levels 1A and 1B, levels 1C and 1D and level 2.…”

An axiomatic approach to bibliometric rankings and indices

“…This interpretation of f g was proposed and discussed in Schreiber et al (2011). It is not consensual however, see Bornmann et al (2008), Bornmann, Mutz, Daniel, Wallon, and Ledin (2009). The above comparison between f h and f τ carries over to the comparison between f * cτ (or f tτ ) and f g .…”

“…We feel that it should not be a major difficulty to adapt our conditions for the study of the many variants (Bornmann et al, 2011, p. 349 present no less than 37 variants of the h-index) of these indices (see Kosmulski, 2013, for a synthetic presentation). The empirical literature is not consensual on the way to categorize these variants (compare, e.g., Bornmann et al, 2008with Schreiber et al, 2011.…”

“…Our analysis does not appeal to an explicit model of production of publications and citations (for an introduction to such models, see Egghe, 2005). Similarly, we do not propose any empirical study that would allow to analyze the links between these rankings and indices on a given set of authors (for such analyses, see, e.g., Bornmann and Leydesdorff, 2013, Bornmann, Mutz, and Daniel, 2008, Bornmann, Mutz, Hug, and Daniel, 2011, van Raan, 2006. Hence, we acknowledge the limitations of the axiomatic approach to bibliometrics put forward by Glänzel and Moed (2013).…”

The impact factor

“…Automated calculators are available on Web of Knowledge, Scopus, and via Google Scholar. Several variations of the h-index were created in order to overcome some criticism [12], but this is beyond the scope of this editorial.…”