Socializing the h-index

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Social h-index, a new bibliometric measure that redistributes individual impact scores to better reflect collaborative contributions within research communities.

Contribution

It proposes the Social h-index, a novel variant of the h-index that accounts for collaborative impact, addressing limitations of traditional individual metrics.

Findings

The Social h-index provides a different perspective on researcher impact.

Examples demonstrate how the Social h-index differs from traditional h-index.

Discussion highlights properties and advantages of the new measure.

Abstract

A variety of bibliometric measures have been proposed to quantify the impact of researchers and their work. The h-index is a notable and widely-used example which aims to improve over simple metrics such as raw counts of papers or citations. However, a limitation of this measure is that it considers authors in isolation and does not account for contributions through a collaborative team. To address this, we propose a natural variant that we dub the Social h-index. The idea is to redistribute the h-index score to reflect an individual's impact on the research community. In addition to describing this new measure, we provide examples, discuss its properties, and contrast with other measures.