The influence of self-citation corrections on Egghe's g index

TL;DR

This paper examines how excluding self-citations affects Egghe's g index, showing that self-citations have a more significant impact on the g index than on the h index, thereby refining citation-based metrics.

Contribution

It introduces a method to adjust the g index by removing self-citations and compares its effects with the h index across multiple physics cases.

Findings

Self-citation correction significantly impacts the g index.

The g index better characterizes citation data than the h index.

Self-citations influence the g index more than the h index.

Abstract

The g index was introduced by Leo Egghe as an improvement of Hirsch's index h for measuring the overall citation record of a set of articles. It better takes into account the highly skewed frequency distribution of citations than the h index. I propose to sharpen this g index by excluding the self-citations. I have worked out nine practical cases in physics and compare the h and g values with and without self-citations. As expected, the g index characterizes the data set better than the h index. The influence of the self-citations appears to be more significant for the g index than for the h index.