The success-index: an alternative approach to the h-index for evaluating an individual’s research output

Abstract

Among the most recent bibliometric indicators for normalizing the differences among fields of science in terms of citation behaviour, Kosmulski (Journal of Informetrics 5(3):481-485, 2011) proposed the NSP (Number of Successful Paper) index. According to the authors, NSP deserves much attention for its great simplicity and immediate meaning-equivalent to those of the h-indexwhile it has the disadvantage of being prone to manipulation and not very efficient in terms of statistical significance. In the first part of the paper, we introduce the success-index, aimed at reducing the NSP-index's limitations, although requiring more computing effort. Next, we present a detailed analysis of the success-index from the point of view of its operational properties and a comparison with the hindex's ones. Particularly interesting is the examination of the success-index scale of measurement, which is much richer than the h-index's. This makes success-index much more versatile for different types of analysis-e.g., (cross-field) comparisons of the scientific output of (1) individual researchers, (2) researchers with different seniority, (3) research institutions of different size, (4) scientific journals, etc..

Evaluating research institutions: the potential of the success-index

“…Estimating the citation propensity by using the distribution of (i) the number of references given or (ii) the citations obtained by the publications of the reference sample. We remark that the condition that the average number of references given should be equal to the average number of citations obtained is valid only within relatively closed information fields (Vinkler 2004;Franceschini et al 2012a). 3.…”

“…According to the formal definition of the success-index (Franceschini et al 2012a), a score is associated to each (i-th) of the (P) publications of interest:…”

“…In a recent article, Franceschini et al (2012a) introduced the success-index of a generic group of scientific papers, defined as the number of papers with a number of citations greater than or equal to CT i , i.e., a generic comparison term associated with a generic i-th paper. CT i is an estimate of the number of citations that a publication-in a certain scientific context and period of time-should potentially achieve.…”

“…Thanks to some peculiar properties described in detail in (Franceschini et al 2012a), the success-index is very versatile for other normalizations aimed at obtaining the so-called sizeindependency. Given a general group of (multidisciplinary) papers and the same capacity of producing ''successful'' papers, it is reasonable to assume that the success-index should increase proportionally with the different types of ''resources'' deployed.…”

Exploring the Hjif-Index, an Analogue to the H-Like Index for Journal Impact Factors

“…Other authors have suggested several other h-type indices including the g-index [7], H (2) -index [8], success index [9], A-and AR-indices [10] and R-index [11]. Additional studies have proposed new h-type indices or related them to research evaluation methods [12][13][14][15][16].…”