IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0005429.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The e-Index, Complementing the h-Index for Excess Citations

Author

Listed:
  • Chun-Ting Zhang

Abstract

Background: The h-index has already been used by major citation databases to evaluate the academic performance of individual scientists. Although effective and simple, the h-index suffers from some drawbacks that limit its use in accurately and fairly comparing the scientific output of different researchers. These drawbacks include information loss and low resolution: the former refers to the fact that in addition to h2 citations for papers in the h-core, excess citations are completely ignored, whereas the latter means that it is common for a group of researchers to have an identical h-index. Methodology/Principal Findings: To solve these problems, I here propose the e-index, where e2 represents the ignored excess citations, in addition to the h2 citations for h-core papers. Citation information can be completely depicted by using the h-index together with the e-index, which are independent of each other. Some other h-type indices, such as a and R, are h-dependent, have information redundancy with h, and therefore, when used together with h, mask the real differences in excess citations of different researchers. Conclusions/Significance: Although simple, the e-index is a necessary h-index complement, especially for evaluating highly cited scientists or for precisely comparing the scientific output of a group of scientists having an identical h-index.

Suggested Citation

  • Chun-Ting Zhang, 2009. "The e-Index, Complementing the h-Index for Excess Citations," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 4(5), pages 1-4, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0005429
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005429
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005429
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005429&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0005429?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lutz Bornmann & Rüdiger Mutz & Hans‐Dieter Daniel, 2008. "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," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 59(5), pages 830-837, March.
    2. Juan E. Iglesias & Carlos Pecharromán, 2007. "Scaling the h-index for different scientific ISI fields," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 73(3), pages 303-320, December.
    3. Bar-Ilan, Judit, 2008. "Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century—A review," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 1-52.
    4. Quentin L. Burrell, 2007. "Hirsch index or Hirsch rate? Some thoughts arising from Liang’s data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 73(1), pages 19-28, October.
    5. Ronald Rousseau & Fred Y. Ye, 2008. "A proposal for a dynamic h‐type index," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 59(11), pages 1853-1855, September.
    6. Antonis Sidiropoulos & Dimitrios Katsaros & Yannis Manolopoulos, 2007. "Generalized Hirsch h-index for disclosing latent facts in citation networks," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 72(2), pages 253-280, August.
    7. Leo Egghe, 2007. "Dynamic h‐index: The Hirsch index in function of time," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 58(3), pages 452-454, February.
    8. Liming Liang, 2006. "h-index sequence and h-index matrix: Constructions and applications," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 69(1), pages 153-159, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Christopher McCarty & James W. Jawitz & Allison Hopkins & Alex Goldman, 2013. "Predicting author h-index using characteristics of the co-author network," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 96(2), pages 467-483, August.
    2. Perc, Matjaž, 2010. "Zipf’s law and log-normal distributions in measures of scientific output across fields and institutions: 40 years of Slovenia’s research as an example," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 4(3), pages 358-364.
    3. Lorna Wildgaard & Jesper W. Schneider & Birger Larsen, 2014. "A review of the characteristics of 108 author-level bibliometric indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(1), pages 125-158, October.
    4. Miguel A. García-Pérez, 2009. "A multidimensional extension to Hirsch’s h-index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 81(3), pages 779-785, December.
    5. Mingers, John & Leydesdorff, Loet, 2015. "A review of theory and practice in scientometrics," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 246(1), pages 1-19.
    6. Jingda Ding & Chao Liu & Goodluck Asobenie Kandonga, 2020. "Exploring the limitations of the h-index and h-type indexes in measuring the research performance of authors," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(3), pages 1303-1322, March.
    7. Edgar D. Zanotto & Vinicius Carvalho, 2021. "Article age- and field-normalized tools to evaluate scientific impact and momentum," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(4), pages 2865-2883, April.
    8. Ali Palali & Roel van Elk & Jonneke Bolhaar & Iryna Rud, 2017. "Are good researchers also good teachers? The relationship between research quality and teaching quality," CPB Discussion Paper 347, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    9. Maziar Montazerian & Edgar Dutra Zanotto & Hellmut Eckert, 2020. "Prolificacy and visibility versus reputation in the hard sciences," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 123(1), pages 207-221, April.
    10. S. Alonso & F. J. Cabrerizo & E. Herrera-Viedma & F. Herrera, 2010. "hg-index: a new index to characterize the scientific output of researchers based on the h- and g-indices," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 82(2), pages 391-400, February.
    11. Ali Palali & Roel van Elk & Jonneke Bolhaar & Iryna Rud, 2017. "Are good researchers also good teachers? The relationship between research quality and teaching quality," CPB Discussion Paper 347.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    12. Bornmann, Lutz & Mutz, Rüdiger & Hug, Sven E. & Daniel, Hans-Dieter, 2011. "A multilevel meta-analysis of studies reporting correlations between the h index and 37 different h index variants," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(3), pages 346-359.
    13. Brandão, Luana Carneiro & Soares de Mello, João Carlos Correia Baptista, 2019. "A multi-criteria approach to the h-index," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 276(1), pages 357-363.
    14. J Mingers, 2009. "Measuring the research contribution of management academics using the Hirsch-index," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 60(9), pages 1143-1153, September.
    15. Qurat-ul Ain & Hira Riaz & Muhammad Tanvir Afzal, 2019. "Evaluation of h-index and its citation intensity based variants in the field of mathematics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(1), pages 187-211, April.
    16. Zhang, Lin & Thijs, Bart & Glänzel, Wolfgang, 2011. "The diffusion of H-related literature," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 583-593.
    17. John Panaretos & Chrisovaladis Malesios, 2009. "Assessing scientific research performance and impact with single indices," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 81(3), pages 635-670, December.
    18. Palali, Ali & van Elk, Roel & Bolhaar, Jonneke & Rud, Iryna, 2018. "Are good researchers also good teachers? The relationship between research quality and teaching quality," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 40-49.
    19. Alonso, S. & Cabrerizo, F.J. & Herrera-Viedma, E. & Herrera, F., 2009. "h-Index: A review focused in its variants, computation and standardization for different scientific fields," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 273-289.
    20. Vîiu, Gabriel-Alexandru, 2016. "A theoretical evaluation of Hirsch-type bibliometric indicators confronted with extreme self-citation," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 552-566.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0005429. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.