The R- and AR-indices: Complementing the h-index

Abstract

Based on the foundation laid by the h-index we introduce and study the R-and AR-indices. These new indices eliminate some of the disadvantages of the h-index, especially when they are used in combination with the h-index. The R-index measures the h-core's citation intensity, while AR goes one step further and takes the age of publications into account. This allows for an index that can actually increase and decrease over time. We propose the pair (h, AR) as a meaningful indicator for research evaluation. We further prove a relation characterizing the h-index in the power law model. h-index, A-index, R-index, AR-index, g-index, performance evaluation, power law

Would it be possible to increase the Hirsch-index, π-index or CDS-index by increasing the number of publications or citations only by unity?

“…h where C(P h ) is the number of citations obtained by P h papers. R-index (Jin et al, 2007) Gross impact of the hcore papers.…”

“…The A-index (Table 1) may be regarded as an improved h-index because it takes into account the increasing influence of the h-core papers manifested by the increased number of citations (Jin, 2006, Jin et al, 2007. It increases namely with increasing citations to the hcore publications.…”

“…Also the R-index may be regarded as an improvement of the h-index (Jin, 2006;Jin et al, 2007). The assumption behind the index is that it would represent the scientific eminence by the square root of the total impact (i.e.…”

“…The h-type indices may represent the number of citations to the hcore papers e.g. A-index (Jin, 2006) and R-index (Jin et al, 2007) or different combinations of the rank number of papers and citations (e.g. g-index, Egghe, 2006).…”

Twenty Hirsch index variants and other indicators giving more or less preference to highly cited papers

“…For example in order to take the influence of self-citations into account one has to correct the citation counts which was done for the present 26 datasets [19]; for the consideration of multiple authors one can modify the paper counts which was also done for these datasets without [20] and with [21] self-citation corrections. It might also be reasonable to take the age of a paper into account so that citations to more recent publications get a higher weight [10].…”