hIa: an individual annual h-index to accommodate disciplinary and career length differences

Abstract

Hirsch's h-index cannot be used to compare academics that work in different disciplines or are at different career stages. Therefore, a metric that corrects for these differences would provide information that the h-index and its many current refinements cannot deliver. This article introduces such a metric, namely the hI,annual (or hIa for short). The hIa-index represents the average annual increase in the individual h-index. Using a sample of 146 academics working in five major disciplines and representing a wide variety of career lengths, we demonstrate that this metric attenuates hindex differences attributable to disciplinary background and career length. It is also easy to calculate with readily available data from all major bibliometric databases, such as Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge, Scopus and Google Scholar. Finally, as the metric represents the average number of single-author-equivalent "impactful" articles that an academic has published per year, it also allows an intuitive interpretation. Although just like any other metric, the hIa-index should never be used as the sole criterion to evaluate academics, we argue that it provides a more reliable comparison between academics than currently available metrics.2 | P a g e

Microsoft Academic (Search): a Phoenix arisen from the ashes?

“…Microsoft Academic (30) and Scopus (27) provide values in between these two extremes. In terms of the hIa -an individual annualized h-index (see Harzing, Alakangas & Adams, 2014), differences are smaller as both Scopus and the Web of Science miss coverage of a range of older articles, thus reducing the number of years since my first publication. As a result, the values of the hIa for Scopus (1.11), Microsoft Academic (1.10) and the Web of Science (1.06) are very close together.…”

Microsoft Academic: is the phoenix getting wings?

“…This comparison will be conducted at a fairly high level of aggregation; unlike Harzing (2016) we will not compare each academic's individual publication record across databases. Instead, we will look at how Microsoft Academic compares with the three other data sources in terms of the average number of papers, citations, h-index and hIa (see Harzing, Alakangas & Adams, 2014) for the 145 academics in our sample. We first conduct our analysis for the sample as a whole, and subsequently explore the differential coverage across disciplines and individuals.…”

Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Editor Behavior through Potentially Coercive Citations

“…Their role has been discussed in many papers, often in order to criticize or refine the h-index [20,21]. "A scientist has index h if h of his or her N p papers have at least h citations each and the other (N p -h) papers have ≤h citations each" where N p is number of published papers [22].…”